Fire
by Julia456
Summary: Post 'Ascension II'. X23, Phoenix, Sentinels, and three different kinds of ascension.
1. Prologue: Exodus

Disclaimer haiku: Burn the past, forget/ The future; the X cannot/ Be owned by me. Sigh.

Notes: "The Phoenix Saga" and "The Dark Phoenix Saga" rate as some of the greatest X-Men stories ever told, but so too does "Days of Future Past." If you have not read "DoFP," you really need to do so. I myself read it in a trade paperback - 'Greatest Battles of the X-Men' - which, I've just now noticed, placed "DoFP" after the 1960s story "The Sentinels Live!" and the Dark Phoenix swan song "The Fate of the Phoenix!". Thus does my subconscious write my stories for me.

* * *

His father called him "Lawrence" and he hated it.

He hated a lot of things about his father, but most of all the way the man was always too busy. Too busy to come to see him in California. Too busy to call. Too busy to come to the funeral. Too busy to make his requests in person.

"Larry," Judge Chalmers said, quiet and compassionate. The living room was silent and still otherwise. "We have to leave within the hour."

Larry's eyes flicked to the bastion of black-suited muscle standing behind Chalmers - and blocking the way to the front door. The man had no expression, just a slash of a mouth beneath pitch-black sunglasses. Larry had known the man worked for his father as soon as he saw him looming behind Judge Chalmers in the San Fransisco sunlight.

And if his father was sending thugs with his messenger, it meant only one thing. Larry shifted his attention back to Judge Chalmers. "I'm not coming back, am I, sir?"

Chalmers shook his graying head with something approaching regret. "Sorry, son."

Larry nodded slowly. Resignation settled over him like a blanket, along with a deep uncaring as to what happened next. "Okay. Just - I need five minutes to pack?"

The black-suited man said curtly, "Five minutes." He had a voice like rocks tumbling.

Larry nodded again, and made his way up the stairs of the house he'd lived in since he was two years old. Judge Chalmers had drawn up the will that had kept the rambling Victorian in Larry's hands after his mother's death, and managed the trust fund that ensured it didn't fall down around his ears. The wood floors creaked and the upstairs plumbing was still a risk but it was_ his_ house - _home_ - and he felt a flare of hatred at his father for taking it away from him.

He had five minutes to pack a lifetime into a suitcase. He lost one minute just standing in his room, thinking of all the things he couldn't possibly take with him. The next three minutes were spent in a frenzy as he tore through all of his belongings, throwing things into the suitcase on his bed: clothes, a favorite childhood toy, his laptop, the disks with his projects on them, the hard copy of his thesis...

He stopped and looked at the suitcase, evaluating the capacity and what he had already filled. There was room, he decided, and carefully lifted the framed picture from its place on the nightstand beside his bed. His mother smiled from behind the glass, arms tight around his seven- year-old self and the science-fair trophy he was clutching. He'd taken first prize that day.

Larry touched his mother's face, smiling a little himself in wistful memory. The photo had been snapped before the chemo made her hair fall out, or smeared dark hollows around her eyes, or stretched the pale skin so tightly over her bones that she looked like a skeleton. Before the cancer ate a searing, sprawling path through her brain. Before the long days in the hospital or the black, bleak days circling the funeral.

Mme. Marie Curie, Nobel Prize laureate and revered pioneer of science, had spent her life chasing after the elusive dragon of radiation, only to have the object of her search turn and devour her from within. Larry's mother had likewise lived and died in the glow of atomic particles.

And he missed her. Five years later, the grief was still fresh.

Larry tucked the framed photo into the clothes, where it would be cushioned, then closed and locked the suitcase. Judge Chalmers appeared in the doorway, a black-suited bulwark filling the space behind him. "It's time, Larry," Chalmers said.

Larry took a breath and nodded. "I'm ready."

He picked up the suitcase and let Judge Chalmers usher him gently from the house his mother had given him on her deathbed. At the front door he stopped and fished the keys out of his pocket, locking the rest of the memories in. Or locking his father out.

The black suit took the suitcase and proceeded to the dark, sleek sedan idling at the curb, where another black suit was filling most of the front seat. The suitcase was placed in the trunk with the same curt efficiency, and then the man took up a station at the rear passenger door, standing impassively like an overgrown footman.

As they made their way down the sidewalk, Judge Chalmers reached out and patted Larry on the back. "Larry. Don't worry. Your father is trying to protect you, and so am I."

"Thank you, sir," Larry managed to say, although he felt not a whit thankful. He climbed into the car after Judge Chalmers and the black-suited man shut the door almost on his foot. The car settled noticeably lower as the man got into the front seat beside his square-jawed twin, and then they were off.

Larry did not look back. That would have been an admission of weakness; he was at war now with his father and there was no time for weakness. What he did instead was discreetly touch the medallion hanging around his neck, hidden by his shirt. The medallion his mother had given to him on her deathbed.

She had lifted it from a plain black cardboard jewelry box and slipped it over his neck as he bent over her thin frame, buried under scratchy linen hospital blankets.

"Never take it off," she'd said, grasping his hands in hers with a fierceness that belied her fragile condition. A fire had burned in her eyes that had never been there before. "Never. Promise me."

He had nodded blindly, holding tight to her cold, bony fingers. The medallion then had been an unfamiliar weight, its unusual contours alien to his body. "I promise."

"Good," she had said, letting go of his hands and wilting back against the hospital-bed pillows. A weak smile had grazed her face. "I love you."

Larry clung to that memory, taking strength from it. Who cared what his father did? He had the proof of his mother's love with him constantly.

"Where are we going?" he thought to ask, but only Judge Chalmers tried to answer, and that was with a helpless shrug and sigh. The black suit in the passenger's seat turned his thick neck slightly, getting Larry in his field of vision. Larry stared at where he thought the man's eyes were, determined not to show weakness. After a moment the man turned back.

"Your father neglected to tell me," Chalmers said to him in a low voice, leaning across the leather seat.

Larry was not surprised. Bolivar Trask had always held his secrets close.

It was one of things his son hated about him.


	2. Listening

She was conceived in a petri dish and born in a nutrient bath. 

She had no mother. She could be said to have a father, if the definition of such was stretched to include an unadorned genomic sequence. Even that had been altered; altered to produce an egg, altered to make a male child into a female.

But there was more to fatherhood than mere paternity, and she had no father in that sense. She was the truest orphan that had ever been. She could not even claim a name of her own. Just a designator. Numbers and letters. If pressed, with no family and no friends, with no records of her birth and life, she could not prove her own existence.

Those were not things that she thought of frequently, however. Certainly not when she was crouched in a narrow ventilation duct with a hundred thousand dollars' worth of stolen listening equipment spread out around her. It was dark and hot in the duct, far warmer than the weather outside. Sweat eased between her skin and her clothes, slicked her hair against the edges of her face. She could taste salt in every breath.

She pressed the earpiece against her skull and closed her eyes, trying to restrict the sensory input to sound only. It didn't entirely work; she could still feel the tremors of the air conditioning system, could still smell the myriad scents of the building drifting through the duct - including the burnt-ozone tang of the laser grid that she had bypassed on her way in.

"- timetable is still uncertain, sir," a voice was saying. A soldier of no rank and no importance. His report had been stammered and difficult to hear, even for her. Yet it had been vital to hear every detail, and she had very nearly reached her tolerance limit while he rambled.

"I fail to see the point of looking at this situation at all," another voice said, cutting into the conversation with a tinge of irritated boredom. She knew who the voice belonged to; a four-star general sitting on the President's Cabinet. He had arrived at the building in an armored limousine bristling with bodyguards. She could have killed him in under five minutes.

"The point is," the third voice said, louder and more clear than the others combined, "that we are facing a potential coup."

She knew that voice, too, and she scowled at it with her eyes closed.

Laughter, tinny and derisive, from the general. "_Really_, now, Colonel. He's shown no inclination whatsoever-"

"I'm not talking about _him_, General." The colonel's tone bordered on insubordination. "I'm talking about his creations. You can't deny that they're powerful weapons easily capable of -"

"Saving the world," the general interrupted, now not only annoyed but chill. The ice reached her unmelted in the heat. "Or have you forgotten so quickly?"

Silence crackled in her ear. In the confined world of the duct, it was louder than the steady in- and-out rush of her breathing.

The general's voice finally ordered, "Drop this line of inquiry. The Pentagon directive stands. I don't want to hear another word of this. _Especially_ words from this agency. Understood, _Colonel_?"

"Understood, sir," the colonel said, stiff and formal, biting the words off. The aggression lurking in his tone was unmistakable.

A door shut with a muffled click. The colonel sighed. "What's the timetable?"

"Sometime in the next twenty-four hours," the nameless soldier answered, hesitant.

Someone, most likely the colonel, slammed a fist against an unyielding surface. "I can't tell if this is madness or just plain stupidity. Trask and his Sentinels are the biggest threat to national security since Baron Zemo - Yes? What is it?"

"Sir, there's been a perimeter breach. One of the laser grids in the ventilation system is registering as non-functioning."

"Move to lockdown and have the ducts swept."

But when the SHIELD agents crawled through the ducts, all that they found was a hundred thousand dollars' worth of abandoned listening equipment. It was difficult to catch someone who didn't exist, and more difficult yet to keep them.

And Weapon X23 did not exist.


	3. Into Darkness

Outside the car, it was swiftly becoming too dark to see anything. Not as though there was anything to see, Larry thought, slumped against the window on his side of the backseat. The glass was pressing against his forehead and the seatbelt was cutting across his shoulder, but it was more comfortable than the interminable plane ride. Then, he'd been sandwiched between twin mountains of black-suited muscle, most likely to prevent him from trying anything foolish. 

It had worked; he'd feared to do so much as attempt to uncramp his legs. Each time he'd felt the urge to move, he'd had visions of a ham-sized fist reaching out, clamping down on an arm or his neck, and snapping a bone cleanly in half with the merest twitch of effort.

He didn't doubt that his father's hired thugs would hurt him. He was fairly certain that they wouldn't _kill_ him, but not completely certain, not with that sacred one-hundred-percent guarantee that scientists longed for and never saw. After all, it would be convenient for Dr. Bolivar Trask if his only child vanished from the face of the Earth. It would mean more time to focus on his work.

"How much further will it be, do you think?" Judge Chalmers asked, clearing his throat. The judge was not ancient, but he _was_ over sixty years of age and not accustomed to sitting for endless hours in confined spaces. A federal judge had assistants and interns for that sort of thing.

The black suit who'd escorted Chalmers to Larry's door deigned to answer. "Not permitted to say, sir."

Larry went back to staring out his window. The New Mexico landscape rolled past in red-hued chunks of jutting rock and sand, and the far-off jagged purple line of mountains. They were deep in the desert, far removed from the last remnants of civilization; if not for the undeniable fact of the highway, he would have doubted that people had ever touched this ground.

"Problem?" the black suit in the driver's seat asked. Larry had taken to calling them One and Two in his mind, if only because he feared they would somehow sense more derisive nicknames and crush his skull.

One shook his head, putting the stitching of his suit at noticeable risk. "Negative. Continue."

Larry sat up straighter to ascertain what they were discussing, and was surprised to see a slender figure picked out by the yellow-white glow of the headlights ahead of them. A person standing on the side of the road, one arm outstretched - hitchhiking, he realized, as they drew closer. It was a teenage girl, wearing an olive-green jacket and pants, like army fatigues without the camo. He caught a glimpse of her face, pale and tired and white beneath a fringe of short red hair, and then they were rushing past on their journey into the darkness.

"Hey," Larry said, frowning back at the small person fading into the red-tinted night. Chalmers made a cautionary gesture, but Larry disregarded it. "We're not going to stop?"

One exchanged a glance with Two. They were both still wearing their sunglasses despite the onset of full night. "No."

"You can't handle a _girl_?" Larry asked, sharp, hoping to needle them. Desperate, suddenly, to rile the men he'd spent the afternoon trying to pacify. He didn't care about the girl - stranded in the middle of nowhere after dark - so much as he cared about scoring a point, any point, against these people who'd so casually hijacked his life.

One shifted in his seat to face Larry, making the metal creak under the strain. He dropped his sunglasses just low enough for Larry to see his eyes: flat, black, and soulless. A shark's eyes. "No," he rumbled. It was not an answer to his last question; it was a repetition of refusal.

Larry swallowed and nodded faintly. One stared at him with that hard, dead gaze for a moment longer, then slid his sunglasses up the shelf of his nose and resettled his bulk facing front.

Judge Chalmers gave Larry a sympathetic look. "We'll be there shortly, I'm sure, Larry. Your father will be delighted to see you safe."

"My father," Larry started, then let the rest of it die unspoken. He didn't know why his father wanted him suddenly underfoot after a lifetime's neglect; he had his suspicions, regarding his own engineering skills and research, but nothing substantive enough to say aloud. It would have been unkind to the judge to say, _My father loves his robots more than he ever loved me_, after Judge Chalmers had gone out of his way to ensure the family reunion. Instead he shook his head briefly and mumbled, "Nothing, sir."

The car ride continued. Now there was nothing that could been seen beyond the glass, not even stray hitchhikers. Only the cold silver pinpricks of stars glittering high overhead. Larry watched them, thinking about his mother, thinking about his father, wishing he was not an only child, and managed despite the low hum of anxiety to doze slightly.

He awoke to the lurch of inertia as the sedan slowed and braked, and blinked to see a jeep idling on the other side of the road. Armed soldiers in heavy body armor were scattered around the sedan and the jeep; directly ahead of the car was a road block guarded by more soldiers. Out of this small army, one soldier approached the car with his gun drawn.

Two lowered the driver's window and flashed a plastic ID badge. One handed over a badge of his own, which was duly inspected and checked against a clipboard the soldier held in the hand that wasn't toting an automatic weapon. The soldier returned the badges, peered into the back seat, nodded respectfully at Judge Chalmers and Larry, and waved the car on.

The ground here was broken and rockier, the road surrounded by steep edifices of crumbling, wind-carved rock. The road curved around a thick outcropping of boulders, and as the car made the turn Larry saw their destination spread out before him.

The complex was lit up like high noon, blotting out the stars with its glow, but to him it looked like nothing more than the heart of darkness itself.

And my father is its king, he thought, and had to touch his mother's medallion again.


	4. Lost in the Desert

Note: "Albert Jethro" is a name I borrowed from 'JAG' specificially and uber-producer Donald Bellisario generally; DB uses the name (his father's) in just about all of his shows. And the origin of the dog's name... should be obvious. :)

* * *

The red-haired girl had faded from Larry's memory as fast as the car he rode in had blown past her, but she herself kept thinking about the dark sedan long after the red tailights had vanished.

She'd had the bad luck to become marooned on a stretch of highway that, apparently, saw little to no traffic. The sedan had been the only car to pass since the first glimmers of twilight had appeared on the horizon, and the only vehicle all day to go in the same direction as she. Now she was absolutely alone once again.

It was cold in the desert night, and her jacket was not made to counteract the pervading chill. She walked down the road in an effort to stay warm, arms crossed over her chest and hands tucked away. Her hair was short, brutally so, and it offered little protection either; her ears were freezing and so was her nose. At least the boots on her feet were warm, if not exactly in good condition.

She wondered how she'd gotten to this place in the middle of nowhere. It seemed that something momentous had happened - obviously, something had - but she couldn't remember what. The farthest back her memories stretched was afternoon, when she had suddenly found herself standing in the middle of the faded asphalt, facing west into the mountains. How she'd gotten there, why she'd come to that particular spot, where she'd been before, who she was, even - it was all a great gray sea of nebulous fog in her mind.

It was as though she had never existed until she blinked and saw the desert vista. She felt like a dreamer rudely awakened.

"At least a dreamer could get some sleep," she said aloud, shivering and tucking her arms against her more tightly still. Her voice was rusty and strange to her ears, her tongue thickened by half a day in the desert sun and no water. She was hungry, thirsty, and exhausted by hours of frantic worry and speculation - far too uncomfortable to consider sleeping.

She thought crossly of the sedan again. Would it have killed them to pull over and talk to her, at least? Hand her some water? She hadn't expected them to give her a ride, not exactly. She knew she didn't look innocent and harmless. Her olive-green jacket and pants were stained with a wide variety of substances, torn in places, patched in places. Her pale orange boots were badly scuffed. Everything she had on was filthy besides. And she was hitchhiking in the desert, miles from any semblance of civilization. She could not have looked more suspicious if she had tried.

"But I didn't try," she muttered. She kicked at the thin, rocky sand at her feet in frustration and hopelessness. "I don't even know who I am!"

Any sensible person would have found a place to curl up for the night, she thought, but she kept trudging towards her nameless destination, her unknown goal. West. That's where she'd been facing when she came to herself, and lacking better options, that's where she'd decided to go. She'd gone at least ten miles, all of it slow and painful - first sweating, now shivering. Was she always so tenacious? Had this persistence come to her through experience or innate nature? She had no way of knowing, and the uncertainty ate at her soul as she walked.

Lost in the desert in more ways than one, she thought morosely, shivering again.

She heard a noise behind her, low and far-off, and turned to see what else was stirring in the night desert. Two tiny flickers of light, hardly larger than the stars overhead but more steady, were slowly approaching.

She felt a surge of elation at her luck; another car!

It took forever for the distant car to reach her, but when it did, it slowed down to an idling stop in front of her - another piece of good luck. Her potential salvation was a truck, an ancient one, rusting and lacking important hardware like door handles and windshields. The engine coughed and sputtered, but it was running, and she decided not to worry about that yet. Inside was a driver and a large, panting hound dog that took up most of the seat.

The driver was as ancient as the truck; in place of rust he had a thinning fringe of yellow-white hair dusting his wrinkled sun-browned skull. He looked stringy and dried out, as though he too had wandered in the desert for endless times, but his eyes twinkled with compassion, and his expression was friendly as he called out, "Need a lift, miss?"

The dog belied the offer by growling loudly and showing the hint of fang below his lip.

She ignored the growling, although the dog made her nervous for some reason, and gave the driver the largest, most grateful smile she could manage. "Yes, thank you!"

"Have ta get in the back," the man said, jerking a thumb towards the truck bed. The back was full of junk - bits and pieces of furniture and machinery, empty gallon cans, plastic bags - but she nodded and jogged around to the gaping hole where the tailgate should have been. She scrambled up with alacrity and found a perch on one of the empty cans.

The driver put the truck into gear and it lurched forward, nearly unseating her. Over the rattle and bump of the truck, he called back, "Where you headin', honey?"

"West," she answered, deliberately vague, coughing to clear her throat.

"Here," the driver said, tossing her a half-empty clear plastic water bottle through the missing rear windshield. "You look like you need it more'n Thor."

Thor the hound dog lifted his head and growled at her anew. She stuck her tongue out at him before eagerly tipping the bottle to her mouth. The water was cool and wonderful, and if it was flavored with dog saliva, she couldn't tell.

"Albert Jethro," the driver said, introducing himself.

She expected to be at a loss, to be rude to this generous old man by having to refuse to tell him who she was. But her name popped onto her tongue as if summoned by the water: "I'm Rachel."

"Miss Rachel," Albert Jethro said, nodding formally. He did not seem nearly as astonished by the miracle of her name as she did. Rachel, she repeated in her mind. She was Rachel. It wasn't a guess, it wasn't a random selection - it was her name. She was almost dizzy with relief and delight at having snatched a part of her past from the nebulous gray.

"I am Rachel," she whispered to the stars. Only Thor noticed. He growled.


	5. Secrets

SHIELD held its secrets dear. It had taken X23 precious hours to break into their earthbound headquarters, get the information she needed, escape, and make her preparations. She preferred to go into situations with nothing but herself - her body and her skills, honed to the same razor sharpness as the metal that laced her claws.  
  
But this situation called for strategy. Planning. Analysis. Research. A half-billion-dollar miniature electro-magnetic pulse generator.  
  
The last was the most difficult. She had known already where one could be found. And she had known that it would take almost as much work to get the EMP generator as it would to complete her main objective. She was also working under a strict time limit.  
  
Unfortunately, Stark Industries held its secrets dear as well.  
  
She had breached the perimeter easily, made it past the watchful human and electronic eyes, broke into the laboratory building proper using one of the devices she'd liberated from a now- defunct HYDRA base. Cool and quiet as a ghost against the chill desert night, she had slipped into the fifth-floor lab that held her prize, and there met her first true obstacle.  
  
The EMP generator was roughly spheroid, slightly smaller than a basketball, a softly gleaming thing of silver metal and plastic in the shadow-choked room. It rested securely inside a massively thick containment unit that sat, square and stolid, in the middle of the lab. The metal containment unit had a tiny viewing window - a portal of armored glass too small to fit a hand through - but no obvious seams or lock mechanism. She suspected it responded to voice commands or the presence of specific DNA patterns, neither of which she was equipped to uncover.  
  
Acutely aware of the rapidly vanishing time, she paced slowly around the containment unit, studying it with herself and with a small HYDRA device. It was an irony of her life that she still used the tools that her tormentors had given her, but she had yet to notice it. Her upbringing had not had much use for irony.  
  
Beyond the walls, armed guards roamed the sprawling grounds of the grandly-named Southwest Divison Central Research and Development Complex. Stark Industries had always clung to the heels of the military, and this R&D facility was not far from the installations at Los Alamos. Like all others run by the weapons manufacturer, the facility specialized in creating machines that could devastate, if not the world, then at least large portions of a hemisphere. The EMP generator she was about to acquire was an exception to that; it had a blast radius of twenty miles. Small - but so was the machine.  
  
She had a bag, folded and tucked into her belt at the small of her back, that would hold the generator perfectly well. Neither her senses nor equipment had discovered an easy way to breach the containment unit, however, and no way to breach it without setting off a suite of alarms. It would take her torch several hours to cut through the metal; a plasma cutter significantly less time, but she did not have one. The remaining options were explosives or the weapons lying much closer to her hands. She narrowed her eyes.  
  
Having wiped herself off the face of the Earth, it would be risky to put herself on the map anew. And yet time was running short; she had five minutes until the guards came to inspect this lab.  
  
She breathed, slowly and carefully, let the muscles of her hands and arms and shoulders relax, let herself be calm. She looked at the containment unit with a different sort of vision, a predator's vision, the sight that picked out weaknesses. Everything and everyone had a weak spot.  
  
There.   
  
She found it and in a single motion slashed out, tearing a fatal gash across one side of the the containment unit. Alarms instantly blared in a flashing red-light cacaphony. She slashed again, vertically this time, then spun on her heel and kicked at the damaged metal where the lines of her claws intersected. The side groaned and wrenched inward, making a gap just large enough for her to reach through and snatch the EMP generator from its resting place.   
  
Guards burst through the door, shouting, weapons clicking, boots stomping. One of them wasted the breath to yell, "Don't move!"  
  
She secured her grip on the generator, turned, and ran.  
  
Always mindful of the need for a quick escape, she had chosen her potential exits the moment she set foot in the laboratory. Stark Industries had built this lab with a row of soaring windows that overlooked a sweeping desert vista. It was five stories off of the ground and therefore unlikely to be subject to internal escape attempts, so the windows were not barred. In any event, with a body throwing itself against them, the glass in the windows would shatter almost immediately.   
  
Lasers cut through the air all around her, sending up the fried-ozone smell she knew as well as her own scent. One connected to her shoulder, punching through the top of her lung and out through her chest, cauterizing flesh as it went. She grunted and did not slow nor drop the generator. Pain was an old friend, and a welcome enemy that she knew how to conquer.  
  
By the time she dove through one of the windows, the wound in her shoulder had healed over. The guards shouted behind her; a fresh barrage of lasers zipped by, but she was moving too quickly. Glass shattered in her face, slicing through the mask and into her skin. The night air bloomed fresh and cold. She could smell sand, sky, the cars in the parking lot, the mountains, a handful of desert flowers...  
  
She reached out with the arm not holding the generator and dug her claws into the face of the building, shedding momentum; it dislocated her newly-healed shoulder but slowed her down, and that was all that mattered. To get distance from the guards, she sheathed her claws and kicked off hard from the building in the same motion. That was somewhere around the third floor. Her new arc, coupled with the remaining distance, would take her nearly two dozen meters from the building - but she no longer had the choice of a good touchdown, a landing which would allow her to escape with minimal damage. It was going to hurt.  
  
She curled around the generator and landed on her back in the hard-packed, rocky earth. The impact knocked the breath from her and ruptured her spleen, tore a few tendons and ligaments, wrenched her spine, bruised muscles, snapped her clavicle and ribs on both sides of her sternum, rattled her brain in its bone shell. The cuts on her face and upper body leaked blood, and her mask and leather jacket stuck to her skin in those places.  
  
But the generator was undamaged. She checked it even as she was trying to force oxygen into her partially deflated lungs; the curving silver surface was not so much as scratched. She lay motionless in the dirt for a handful of seconds, coughing up frothy blood against the mask, waiting impatiently for her body to knit itself back together. The guards would not rush, she knew. They would not expect her to get back up after falling four stories.   
  
No one ever did.  
  
She grunted again and pushed herself to her feet before the healing was completely finished, feeling her vertebrae pop back into place one by one. With the pops came a fresh rush of sensation from her legs as nerves reconnected. She set the generator in the dirt for a moment and pulled the folded bag out, brushing sand and gravel from it while her fractured ribs screamed in protest. Klaxons were shattering the peaceful night, and she heard one sharp-eyed guard high above her shouting, "It's a mutant!"  
  
Alerted to her true nature, Stark Industries' heavy guards would soon be out in their exosuits - a Stark speciality - to hunt her down. _Now_ she didn't have very much time at all. Seconds. But seconds were more than she needed.  
  
She took one of those seconds to force her shoulder back into its socket; the pain cut out immediately, as it always did. She carefully placed the EMP generator into the bag, tugged the zipper closed, slung the strap across her chest and shoulder, and, with the round weight of the machine thumping against her healing spine, sprinted into the fathomless darkness of the night. Behind her mask she grinned a fierce predator's grin; if she could have put the feeling into words, they would have been: There was no secret beyond her reach. 


	6. Dead Man Walking

Note: Stephen Lang is one of the Sentinel-building bad guys in the comics. (He was pivotal to both the Phoenix and the Phalanx, funnily enough.) "Galindez" is another 'JAG' homage - Gunnery Sergeant Victor Galindez, now all but gone from the show, is still one of my fave characters.

* * *

He felt like a condemned criminal being led towards his execution. "Dead man walking," he muttered under his breath. Indeed, One and Two, stone-faced in their black suits, made good substitutes for prison guards. Or the Grim Reaper, for that matter.

Larry walked unwillingly behind the two huge men, Judge Chalmers at his side, as they left the car and entered his father's base of operations proper. It was a huge facility, as the scale of Bolivar Trask's projects demanded it be. The ceilings soared up to nearly forty feet in height at their lowest - plenty of room for one of the robots to wander about. None were at the moment of Larry's arrival, but several could be glimpsed in various stages and poses in adjoining rooms as Larry's escort tromped down the broad, gently sloping main corridor.

They'd scarcely gone fifty feet when One and Two abruptly stopped and parted like a brawny Red Sea. Revealed ahead of them were a handful of soldiers and a lab-coated technician; the soldiers were manning what looked to be a metal detector and fluoroscope melded together, and the technician was approaching with a sycophantic smile on his narrow face.

"Good evening and welcome, Judge Chalmers, Mr. Trask," the technician said, giving them a half- bow. He had glasses with frames thirty years out of style, but he looked hardly older than Larry. "I'm Stephen Lang, one of the, ah, production assistants here. Dr. Trask is engaged in business at the moment; I'm to bring you to him."

Larry bit back a derisive snort even as he was oddly comforted by the rudeness of their erstwhile host. His father. Still too busy.

"Before you can descend," Lang was saying, "I'm afraid we have to run a scan for security purposes."

"Of course," Judge Chalmers said immediately, nodding his gray-haired head. "These are dangerous times. Dr. Trask is a wise man to be cautious."

Lang smiled in nervous relief, as if he hadn't expected it to be so easy. "Yes, of course," he agreed, fairly bobbing, and gestured at the metal detector. "Judge, if you will step through here, please -?"

Judge Chalmers moved forward, and Larry hung back until it was his turn. He took the chance to study his surroundings. As much as he hated to admit it, he was intrigued by the technology and purpose of the place; he couldn't help it. He was an engineer and a scientist, and mammoth secret desert bases and twenty-foot-tall robots held an allure that called even to him. The corridor was metal, long panels of it, joined together in rivetless seams, with strips of fluorescent lights running down the center of the ceiling.

The machine gave a short, piercing tone, making Larry start, and one of the soldiers said crisply, "Clear."

"Excellent," Lang said. He beamed as if he had had something to do with Judge Chalmers' passing inspection. "Now, Mr. Trask, if you would do the same?"

Larry cast a glance at the two behemoths still framing the corridor, still hemming him in; One and Two did not appear to so much as breathe. "Sure," he said, refocusing on Lang. He closed the meter of distance between himself and the machine and allowed the soldiers to brusquely position him correctly. An amber light appeared above his head and split, running down both sides to the floor and sweeping back up. Instead of the short tone, the machine made a disgruntled squawk.

"Sir, I'm going to have to pat you down," one of the soldiers said. The nametag on his fatigues read "Galindez," and he sounded almost apologetic. Larry nodded, resigned to the humiliation, and Galindez quickly and impersonally frisked him.

When Galindez reached his chest, he tugged the medallion free of Larry's shirt and let it fall. The gold-colored metal caught the light and glittered. Larry had expected that, but not the curt, "Remove the necklace, sir."

Larry jerked backwards. "No."

"Please, Mr. Trask," Lang began, smiling his ingratiating smile again.

But Larry interrupted him with a loud and forceful, "_No._ I am _not_ taking it off."

"Sir," Galindez said. He held out one hand for the necklace. The other soldiers were moving to surround Larry; some were reaching towards the holsters at their belts.

Larry looked to Chalmers, standing on the other side of the machine. The judge knew the story behind the medallion; wouldn't he intervene? With more than a touch of desperation, Larry said, "Judge, sir, you know I can't take it off!"

Chalmers made a placating gesture. "Just for a moment, son, please. You can put it on again right away. I know you don't want to, but it won't be the end of the world."

The soldiers looked at him impassively. Lang was twisting his hands, nervous and smiling through gritted teeth. One and Two had filled the only other way out. Larry was trapped.

His anger towards his father surged anew, threatening to wipe out his vision in a haze of murderous red. It was bad enough that he'd been dragged out of his house and across three states. It was bad enough that he'd made the journey with the living embodiments of pain and fear. Bad enough - but not impossible to bear. Now his father was making him break a vow to his mother. _That_ was unforgivable.

"Fine," he snapped, plucking at the twisted gold chain that held the medallion. He pulled it over his head and handed it to one of the soldiers - not Galindez - then stood silently fuming as the machine scanned him again.

"We have to use a handheld scanner too," Galindez said, producing a wand-shaped device that was roughly a foot long and three inches thick. One end of the baton was a rubber grip; the other was an amber light.

"To confirm there are no other problems," Lang confided to Chalmers in a low tone he obviously thought Larry wouldn't hear. He wouldn't have, normally, but for some reason his senses were on high alert, accompanied by an abiding lightheadedness that made the corridor seem to stretch out meters further than it actually did.

The soldier ran the scanner over Larry's feet first, then worked towards his head in the same brisk, professional manner. The light passed in front of his face unexpectedly, before he had a chance to shut his eyes, and suddenly he was not looking at an amber lightbulb behind its corrugated plastic shell, but a bird. A bird with wings of fire, shining like a star at its center, bright enough to blind him. He felt a wave of raw power wash over him, and then he blinked and it was just the amber light again and a soldier giving him a faintly perplexed look underneath the edge of his helmet.

The tone sounded, the pronouncement of "Clear," rang out, and Larry accepted his mother's medallion back with a palpable sence of relief. It settled around his neck with the old familiar weight, and he tucked it into his shirt once more as Lang began leading them deeper into the complex. One and Two stayed behind, and Larry was glad for that small favor.

He wondered what he had seen. A hallucination? A daydream? Probably just a flight of imagination, he decided, brought on by his anger at his father and his overall helplessness to change the situation. That sounded logical enough. He tucked his concerns about it away as neatly as the medallion.

"Dr. Trask will be relieved to know you've made it safely," Lang was saying. He stopped on a platform flush with the floor but marked with yellow-and-black hazard stripes around the edges and bearing a control console in one corner. Lang moved to the console and pressed a quick sequence of buttons. "I hope there weren't any problems?"

Chalmers, putting on his congenial public-figure facade, shook his head. "Oh, no, not at all."

No. The problem was waiting for them downstairs. Larry looked over his shoulder as the lift shuddered into motion and, as they descended, saw one of the robots clomping across the corridor, followed by a trail of white lab coats bearing clipboards. The great metal head turned, pointing the glowing yellow eyes directly at him, and Larry felt an involuntary thrill of fear.

There was no reason, after all, for a Sentinel to pay attention to _him_.

Was there?


	7. In Between

Notes: My apologies for the delay in posting. The advent of Summer A classes, coupled with a rather nasty computer problem, kept me from even _thinking_ about this fic. And then when I _did_ think about it, it starting fighting me. So obviously the stars are aligned against me this week. But! I did get quite a lot done in my "Measurement and Assessment in Education" class.

* * *

Somehow, rattling along in the back of the ancient pickup truck, buffetted by chill winds, Rachel managed to fall asleep. She woke up abruptly, though, when the truck's engine made a loud noise like a miniature nuclear explosion and the vehicle came to a shuddering halt. Along with everything else in the crowded bed of the truck, Rachel went tumbling. Most of the other stuff came to rest on top of her.

Albert Jethro coughed and called, "You okay back there, Miss Rachel?"

"Fine," she managed, pushing a bale of rusting chicken wire off of her chest and sitting up again. Dust and sand had coated every inch of her, and she brushed at it hopelessly. "Are you okay?"

He coughed again; the door squealed opened with a jingle of keys. "Been through worse."

Rachel hauled herself over the side of the truck and went to stand beside Albert Jethro, who was looking at the smoke wafting from beneath the hood of the engine with a kind of grim resignation. "Is it broken?" she asked, made tentative by disappointment.

"Just overheated," he said, sighing and ending it with a cough. "We'll have ta wait a spell 'fore we can get going."

The cold of the night seemed to press down on her with icy fingers, trying to clutch at her bones. They were still miles from being in the middle of nowhere, the road was framed by looming cliffs, and the only light in the sky that wasn't star-based was a distant, faint glow barely arching above the cliffs. She expected ghosts to drift across the road at any moment. "How long?"

He shrugged, ran a hand over his almost hairless pate. "Long enough for the hood to cool off so I can open it, let the engine get some air. Then a good while after that."

Thor, evidently no stranger to these breakdowns, casually stretched his way out of the cab of the truck and began idly investigating the side of the road.

"Come ta think of it, though," Albert Jethro said, nodding and starting in the general direction of the rear of the vehicle, "I may have something in the back I can use." He moved that way, adding, "Mind keepin' an eye on Thor, there, Miss Rachel? He wanders."

"No, no problem," she said, wrapping her arms around herself again. There was nothing she would have liked less than watching out for the hound dog, and judging from the low, smug "whuff" aimed in her direction, she suspected Thor knew it. She wondered if maybe she'd been attacked by dogs or something, once.

Out of sight, Albert Jethro began noisely shifting the contents around, and Rachel reluctantly turned her attention to the dog. Thor was indeed wandering - slowly strolling with his nose down in the narrow stretch of dirt between the road and the cliffs. She trailed behind him at a cautious distance, gradually moving further away from the dim starlit outline of the truck.

She had dreamed when she was asleep. Pieces of it floated back across her consciousness now as her mind wandered with the dog. She'd dreamed of people, familiar people, but she could only remember one of them. A young man with broad shoulders, a narrow waist, wavy blond hair. Tall, handsome and square-jawed. He had blue eyes, she thought, even though she couldn't see his face clearly; it was just a vague idea of a face, although she knew she knew the features by heart. She couldn't remember his name either.

It frustrated her all over again, deeply, to the point of helpless anger, and she shoved the young man out of her mind. Instead she turned over the mystery of why she was not the slightest bit worried about being alone in the desert with a stranger and his dog. Probably because neither Albert Jethro nor Thor were dangerous... but how did she know that?

"Thor?" she tried, cautiously, when the truck was barely more than a streak of pale against the black road. He growled. "Thor, I think we need to get back to Albert Jethro."

Nose to the ground, the hound whuffed again, then let out a short, surprisingly fierce bark and took off running.

"Thor?! Hey, stop!" Rachel cried out, and ran after him. The dog was making a beeline for a dark line in the cliffs that resolved itself into a crumbled trail. She called out to Thor again, but he was already charging up the skinny switchback trail and showed no signs of slowing down. With a glance back at the truck, she followed.

The cliffs here dipped down, lower than their fellows, so she had to climb for less than a minute before the trail flattened out into a broad, windswept plateau. The dog had come to a quivering, hair-bristling stop in the middle of the path in front of her, fixed on a point in the distance. He was growling low in his throat.

"Thor!" she exclaimed, a bit out of breath and more than a little exasperated. "What are you _doing?_"

Then she saw what he was looking at. Far away but closer than the horizon, tucked inside a deep canyon, sprawled a man-made facility. She couldn't see all of it, but given the glow of light hanging over it, it had to be huge. Bunkers, buried half in the earth. Vehicles of all kinds swarming around. A generator station. Something that looked like a water-treatment plant. There was a forest of antennas and satellite dishes sprouting from one low-slung bunker, but only a single road connected it to the outside world; she followed the road back with her eyes and realized it must hook up with the highway she'd been traveling on.

"Wow," she murmured, awestruck. The sight stirred a memory within her. It danced just beyond the edge of her recollection, and while she stood there trying to retrieve it, the night and its unexpected wonders faded out of her awareness...

"Miss Rachel!" Alberto Jethro's voice called, breathless and wheezing from what must have been a mad dash. He didn't look like he was in shape for that, and, brought back to herself, she felt a twinge of remorse. "What's going on up there?"

Rachel bent and grabbed Thor's collar, fear be darned, and tugged him roughly around. The dog offered no resistance and trotted cheerfully down the same path he'd charged up hellbent just a minute before, greeting his master's huffing arrival with a slurpy lick to the hand. "Nothing," she said.

Albert Jethro narrowed his kind eyes but said only, "Well. Looks like the truck is ready to go."

"Actually," she blurted, surprising herself again so badly that she had to stop and feel out what she was going to say. Slowly, she went on, "Actually, I think... I think I'm going to stay here."

Thor whuffed. His master made a noncommittal noise in his throat that sounded about the same. After a moment, Albert Jethro clicked his tongue. "All right. Mind yourself, though, honey," he added, pointing with his wrinkled chin in the direction of the bunkers. "The desert'll kill you, but so will they. And they won't be as gentle about it."

And he should know; he'd come ashore at Normandy in World War II and fought all the way to the heart of Germany.

It popped into her mind the way her name had: without any bidding or any question of the veracity of the information. A trailing afterthought - she reminded him of the figures he'd seen wearily trudging out of places with names like "Dachau" and "Birkenau."

But she didn't know any of those names or places. She wasn't sure she even knew what "World War II" was. It sounded sort of familiar. "World War III" rang a stronger bell.

"I will," she told him, giving him a smile. Albert Jethro nodded farewell, turned with Thor at his heels, and shortly disappeared down the path. Belatedly, she called out, "Thank you for the ride!"

He called back something that might have been "God bless", but she wasn't sure.

Rachel turned back to the facility and squared her shoulders with a deep breath. Her heart was racing in her chest, her blood humming. It was crazy, her mind was saying. It was crazy to intentionally strand herself out here, on the fringe of an unknown lair, when she had a ride to safety waiting. But she _had_ to be here. It was _right_ that she had discovered the facility. It was no accident. Something about the place tugged at her, like a dream halfway glimpsed, or a memory on the tip of her tongue.

Or a strong arm around her neck.

She had the faintest prick of alarm at the back of her skull, and then, before she could turn, a leather-clad arm shot out of the darkness and caught her across the throat. Another arm grabbed at hers with inhuman strength, restraining her as neatly and effortlessly as Rachel had grabbed Thor's collar. Only her legs and feet were free, but she had no leverage to use them.

"Who are you? What are you doing here?" her attacker hissed angrily, and Rachel realized, startled beyond all words, that the person choking her was a teenage girl.


	8. The Best There Is

X23 had not expected the night to be so crowded. Guards she had anticipated; security webs she had planned for; but unknowns wandering blindly through the farthest perimeter of her staging ground...

It was a _desert_. It was supposed to be _deserted_.

Despite her precautions, the unforeseen dog had caught her scent and nearly caught her as well. She had retreated to a rock outcrop, hidden by deep shadows and a slight breeze that blew towards her and away from the dog, which had had enough sense at least to recognize her as a predator and break off his pursuit. In any event she had not moved, had barely breathed, until it became clear that the girl, unlike the old man and the dog, was not going to leave.

Annoyed to the point of anger, she'd left her place in the shadows and crossed the rocky soil soundlessly. The girl had stiffened and begun to turn as if she sensed something, but then it was too late and she was caught.

"What are you doing here?" she hissed again. The girl struggled briefly, uselessly in her grasp. Taller than her captor, at least a few years older, she was stick-thin and not strong enough to break free. A butterfly trapped under a wolf's paw.

"I don't - I'm not doing anything," the girl rasped out. She had soldier's hair, cut short, cut almost to the bare skull, so it could never get in the eyes or be grabbed by an opponent. But her tattered green uniform stank of fear - the pervasive, lived-in fear of years, the kind of fear that crouched in corners of one's mind no matter how valiantly it was suppressed. Without her mask - soaked stiff with blood and therefore ruined, it had been abandoned in the desert - X23 could smell the fear clearly. "I'm not armed. Let me go!"

"_Name_," she demanded, jerking hard with the arm across the girl's throat. Hard enough to momentarily choke, not hard enough to cause permanent damage. She _would_ get a satisfactory answer to _one_ of her questions.

The girl struggled again, earning another sharp jerk across her throat. "Rachel," she croaked. Now her voice, too, bore anger.

Rachel. By force of habit and painful training, X23 flicked through the lists in her mind, the endless lists of potential targets that HYDRA had forced her to memorize. Unsurprisingly, Rachel-with-short-red-hair was not on any of them. Rachel-with-short-red-hair was not on the far less lengthy list of potential allies, either.

The sensible thing to do would have been to pop her hand claws and slit Rachel's throat with a flick of her wrist. Easy. Effortless. She was too close to her target to have it screwed up by an unexpected complication.

But something stayed her hand. Maybe it was her reluctance to do what HYDRA had ingrained within her. Maybe it was the undue influence of Wolverine. Maybe it was the fact that Rachel had been so afraid for so long.

And so had she.

"You smell like fear," she said roughly, releasing her hold on Rachel. The girl staggered forward, whirled around, faced her.

"You have nightmares about being locked in a white room," Rachel shot back, then clapped a hand over her mouth, eyes widening in visible surprise.

Abruptly, X23 became aware of a buzzing in her head - the persistant gentle, probing pressure of intangible fingers slinking through her brain. Telepathy. She snarled and snapped her psychic defenses up.

Rachel flinched as though she'd been struck.

The urge to let the girl live abruptly dried up and blew away as fury loomed in mercy's place. The fire of her rage licked along the paths of her nervous system, lighting the world in shades of stark black-and-white. Of predator and prey.

She popped the claws on her right hand and held her fist low, ready to swing up and into her opponent's torso. "Stay _out_ of my _head!_"

Rachel took a step backward, bringing her hands up.

X23 felt a definite tugging on her leather jacket by dozens of invisble hands. Telekinesis.

She growled, low in her throat, and popped the claws on her other hand, waiting even in her anger to see what the girl would do. A telepath/telekinetic was no obstacle for a HYDRA assassin. She'd gut Rachel and move on. The scent of blood would bloom in the chill desert air; she could almost taste the seductive copper tang already, and it pushed her further to the edge of action and made her blind to the truth that she _did_ know a telepath/telekinetic with red hair.

But then a yellow light very different from the watery stars flashed over the other girl's sick- orange boots and she realized that the roving security patrol had arrived at her position, probably alerted by the flare of mutant powers. The realization hit her like cold water, damping but not extinguishing the conflagration of her rage.

Training kicked in. The situation was changing rapidly. She had an EMP generator on her back, a mutant teenage girl in front of her, two armed guards almost within visual range, and a mission that could not go uncompleted. Four problems that had no immediate common solution at first glance. It took her less than a second to come up with it.

A solution. An obvious solution.

She sheathed her claws, took a quick step, shoved Rachel in the direction of the flashlight. And ran.

Startled, stumbling, Rachel cried out, "What -?"

The light instantly recentered squarely on her face, turning the red hair almost the same orange as the boots. Rachel put up a hand to shield her eyes at the same moment the guard shouted, "_Freeze!_ Stay where you are!"

From her new hiding place among the rocks, tucked in a deep well of shadows that no flashlight could penetrate, X23 watched. The two guards surrounded Rachel, weapons leveled and aimed, barking orders that the bewildered girl followed without resistance. Handcuffs were snapped around Rachel's slender wrists and one guard prodded her forward with the business end of his weapon.

As the trio moved off into the darkness towards the base, she followed, hugging the shadows and keeping the generator from scraping the rock. She was satisfied in her training despite herself.

She was the best there was at what she did.

And she was going to save the world.


	9. Father and Son

Note: While I was writing this chapter, I happened to watch a show on the History Channel about mysterious small-aircraft disappearances in Alaska, which made me think of the Summers clan (of course!), and thus I include a ref to that here in the form of "Victor-319."

* * *

Larry had been in Stephen Lang's presence for less than fifteen minutes, but he was already tired of the man. Lang seemed intent on spending the entire descent chattering at Judge Chalmers about technical details that a former lawyer could not possibly appreciate. It was all consummate apple-polishing, done by a consummate master of the art.

Although if Lang had had any intelligence at all, he would've been sucking up to his boss' kid, Larry thought sourly. Strained relationship or not, a Trask was a Trask. And Trasks got things done.

That was obvious from the Sentinel factory; the facility extended far deeper than even Larry had expected, and never got any smaller than the massive ground-level entrance. They were hundreds of yards underground now and still had almost as far to descend before they reached the bottom- most floor. The levels they were passing were mostly open air, with a web of catwalks and assembly-line conveyor belts strewn across one end of the mammoth void.

The entire facility was built to the scale of the robots, he realized. More than that - it was built _for_ the robots. Human accommodations were barely an afterthought.

"- converted from its former military use, so it's rather sub-par to our New York factory, but we take what we can get," Lang was saying, with a forced, nervous chuckle at his own humor.

"How many Sentinels have been produced?" Larry asked abruptly, turning to face the scientist.

Lang blinked, caught off-guard. "Ah - I think - That information is top secret, Mr. Trask."

"Two a day, for the last month," Larry guessed. He knew he was right; he could see that the production was slow and painstaking, that the assembly was inefficient because of the complicated design, that the robots were simply too _big_ to allow quick work, that the facility looked too clean and new to have been in business for any real length of time. And he knew he was right because Lang's eyes widened briefly behind his glasses. He let arrogance seep into his next words: "Is that right, Mr. Lang?"

"Doctor," Lang corrected. His quick, oily smile did not quite conceal the irritation in his voice, or the dislike in his eyes. "And I really can't say. Mr. Trask."

Larry nodded, unfazed. He'd gotten in a point and they both knew it.

The lift shuddered to a halt. Lang punched a few buttons on his console and gave his two passengers a smile. "Here we are. Please watch your step. Judge Chalmers, sir, if you need a hand -"

"I'm quite fine, thank you," Chalmers said, politely waving away the offer of assistance with a genuine-sounding laugh. "I'm not that much of an old man!"

They stepped off the platform and onto solid ground. Lang laughed too, but it was not nearly as genuine. "Of course not. Dr. Trask is right over here."

Instinctively, Larry's steps slowed, and he fell back behind Judge Chalmers, behind Dr. Stephen Lang. He dreaded this meeting, and the closer he got, the more he felt like bolting.

Why? he chided himself. He hated his father - he wasn't _afraid_ of the man. This was war. He was more than ready for war, especially after the medallion stunt.

Thus heartened, Larry managed to have his head up and a resolute cast to his expression when Lang announced importantly, "Dr. Trask, sir, excuse me, but your son and Judge Chalmers are here."

Bolivar Trask was standing amidst a cluster of lab-coated technicians, all bearing clipboards and PDAs, all talking over one another. At Lang's announcement, Bolivar turned and met the trio with a hearty, "Judge! You have my gratitude for undertaking this long trip to the middle of nowhere."

Neither Dr. Stephen Lang nor Larry Trask were worth a greeting, it seemed. They stood slightly behind Chalmers, suddenly united in their insignificance. Larry felt an unexpected pang of sympathy for the slimy weasel; he knew too well what it felt like to fruitlessly try to impress a man who could not have cared less.

"No - no trouble," Chalmers said, casting a quick, concerned glance at Larry before resuming his politician's smile. "No trouble at all."

Larry superficially resembled his father - tall, with dark brown hair and dark eyes. But Larry was more slightly built than Bolivar, and he had most of his mother's features, and had not once created a machine to kill anything. He noticed now, though, that his posture was almost a perfect mirror of his father's. He hastily shifted position before anyone could see.

"Good," Bolivar said, smiling broadly at the older man. "Lang will take you back to the surface and see to it that you have a proper escort to San Fransisco. Thank you again, Judge Chalmers."

To his credit, Judge Chalmers looked reluctant, but Bolivar Trask was king of his domain and Lang had already begun walking towards the lift they'd just vacated. There was nothing for Chalmers to do but leave as well. Larry lifted a hand in a half-hearted farewell, mumbled some kind of good-bye, and forced his attention to his father as his one ally ascended out of range. Bolivar's warm smile had vanished into a more familiar mask of stone neutrality.

"Lawrence," Bolivar said. In the single word, the name that he knew Larry hated to be called, he managed to convey a lifetime's disappointment and disapproval. I ignore you because you aren't worth being noticed, it seemed to shout.

"Father," Larry answered, trying to keep all traces of emotion out of _his_ voice. Better to be cold than quaking. Sarcasm, hurt and bitter, crept in anyway. "I can't imagine why I'm here. Did you want to ignore me hourly?"

"You're too dramatic for your own good. Just like your mother." Bolivar waved a hand and the lab coats scattered like a disrupted flock of birds. He started striding along the metal-paneled floor, moving away from the lift and into what seemed to be a warren of rooms. The armed soldier stationed at the entrance of the corridor saluted stiffly. Bolivar ignored it. "Come with me, Lawrence."

Anger bubbled up, a wellspring of dark poison in his heart. That _name_ - and the disparaging comment about his mother - when Bolivar hadn't even come to her _funeral_ -

He followed after his father, glowering, imagining one of the robots turning on its master and creator and blasting Bolivar Trask into ashes. The picture was inordinately satisfying, even if it did bring to mind the firebird image he'd seen earlier. Ashes. That was what the man deserved.

Once inside the maze of small rooms and narrow corridors, Bolivar led him into a surprisingly large office that was plainly his and his alone. There was another soldier stationed near the door, which sealed behind them with a pneumatic hiss. As he entered behind his father, Larry had a moment to look around at the big computer console, the blueprints and scale models scattered over every surface, the shelves of technical books (from hefty engineering tomes to a battered 'Origin of Species'), the miscellaneous errata of a genius. A cold, uncaring genius.

Then Bolivar stopped in his tracks, turned, and swept Larry into a fierce embrace. "My boy," he said, and this time there was pain and regret in his voice. "You have no idea how difficult these last years have been - not being able to be there, watching you grow, watching your mind and your talents expand -!"

Larry thought he ought to feel something, but all he was capable of summoning was a kind of hollow shock, as though he was a shell with an echo reverberating around and around inside of him. "My boy" -? What? This could not be the same man who'd missed every defining event and moment of his life. This could not be the same man who'd sent a terse note reading, "The situation here will not allow me to leave at this time," when his son had written to him, pleading, _begging_, for a father's presence in the wake of a mother's death. The man in Larry's lifetime of memories had never hugged him, never touched him affectionately, never showed the slightest hint of favor.

Astonishment made the words impossible to understand for several heartbeats. Then the meaning began to sink in, and the hollow echo inside Larry became a dull, angry thud. He jerked back, breaking the contact as roughly as he could. "You have no idea how difficult it was knowing that my father loved machines more than me."

Bolivar shook his head, looking sorrowful. "Who told you that, Lawrence? Your mother?"

The use of his full name made it even easier for Larry to spit out, "I could see it for myself."

"She agreed to leave, you know," Bolivar said, moving to the computer console and typing in a string of commands. "She thought it was for the best. My work is and was dangerous. A family would have been an inviting target."

"For _who_, Dad? For _what?_" Larry shot back, anger making his tone louder than he intended. "The _mutants?_ The mutants nobody knew about for decades, because they're such menaces to society?"

Bolivar drew himself straight, eyes snapping in annoyance and hands momentarily stilled. "Yes, the mutants. Don't pretend to be on their side. You are my son, after all."

"I never tried to start a gene war," he said, but Bolivar was right and they both knew it. Larry made an attempt to bolster his position by resorting to an unimpeachable argument. "_Mom_ never tried to start a gene war."

"Your mother -" Bolivar began, then chuckled softly. "Your mother was an early contributor to the Sentinel project. She designed the containment units for the fuel cells."

Uncertainly, Larry said, "She was a radiation expert."

"She became one, when we needed to find a way to neutralize mutant powers." Bolivar had finished typing and now stood back from the monitor, gesturing at Larry to come closer. "Ultimately an unsuccessful approach, but profitable nonetheless. We all change through our mistakes, even the Sentinel project. This is the next generation."

Larry peered at the images on the monitor, eyes darting over all of the many details. He saw what it was immediately: "A _space station?_"

"If we'd had one during the Apocalypse debacle, nine of my Sentinels would still be operational. Mutants are everywhere on Earth, Lawrence," Bolivar said, not bothering to hide his disgust - or his pride. "Space is a more... _exclusive_ dominion, where I can build freely."

Larry was awed and humbled despite himself and didn't catch the use of his full name. Twenty- foot-tall hunter-killer robots were one thing; fully automonous space stations were another. He didn't know what "the Apocalypse debacle" had been, but he supposed it was tied in to the worldwide mutant phenomena that had occurred recently. "Does anyone know about this?"

"Only the robots. As we speak, two Sentinel units are finishing construction." Bolivar dropped a hand on Larry's shoulder. "That's why I brought you here."

Larry halfway wanted to shrug off the hand, but his curiosity stopped him. "Oh?"

"As the project becomes larger, the danger increases," Bolivar explained, gesturing with his free hand. "I want you to be safe when the new Sentinels launch, and you can't be safe unless you're here. All I've ever wanted was your safety, Lawrence, you must believe that."

Now he did shrug off the hand. With a touch of both mockery and bitterness, he clarified, "Safe from the mutants."

Bolivar, apparently missing the fact that his son was actively scorning him, nodded gravely. "They know who I am. Anyone named 'Trask' is at risk now, especially engineers specializing in robotics and artificial intelligence."

Larry stared for a moment, startled all over again. "You know what I'm specializing in?"

"The day I found out was one of the proudest of my life, son," Bolivar said. The fine words were somewhat spoiled by the absolute lack of any real emotion behind them, and Larry was about to say so when the space station blueprints abruptly blanked out and were replaced by a flashing red icon.

Bolivar leaned over and tapped the keyboard; a video image expanded to fill the monitor. Larry recognized the soldier in the video as Galindez, from the checkpoint.

"What is it?" Bolivar asked, irritated.

"Sir, the patrol in Victor-319 has apprehended a mutant," Galindez reported. He didn't look as worried as the news would seem to deserve.

"Give me a visual," Bolivar ordered. Obligingly, the screen split into two pictures - Galindez filling one half, three figures walking down a hallway in the other. Two of the figures were soldiers. In between them, hands shackled behind her back, head bowed, was a teenage girl. Larry recognized her with a small internal start - the hitchhiker his car had blown past hours ago. She was a mutant? She looked like a homeless kid. He understood why Galindez wasn't worried; the girl didn't look like she could rob a convenience store, let alone pose a threat to a Sentinel factory.

"Powers?" his father was demanding.

Galindez said crisply, "Psi-shields have registered a few hits - just pings, sir, nothing major."

The other half of the screen suddenly zoomed in on the girl, until her face filled most of the frame. Although still grainy, the resolution was good enough for Larry to easily make out her features. The dull red fuzz of closely-shorn hair, the pale skin, the scuffed, drab olive clothes, the lines of fatigue around her eyes... her incongruously bright, alert green eyes that glowed with an inner light when she lifted them to the camera. She seemed to look straight at him, straight _through_ him, and Larry felt an involuntary shiver run down the length of his spine.

"Good God," Bolivar muttered, squinting at the picture as though he recognized the girl but wasn't quite sure of it. He straightened and, with a great deal more urgency, told Galindez, "I want the base moved to lockdown and all units ready to be deployed immediately. _All_ units. Put a collar on the girl and kill her if so much as a teacup rattles around her."

"Sir, the neural inhibitor collars are still experimental-"

Bolivar cut the soldier off with a roared, "Do it!"

"Yes sir," Galindez replied, loud and brisk and official, and the screen went black.

"What's going on?" Larry ventured.

Bolivar held up a hand for patience, although he wasn't exhibiting any himself. The other hand was rapidly scrolling through video feeds from the base's cameras, which appeared to number in the thousands. Larry saw nothing, but his father obviously did. He slammed a fist on the console, making the grainy video images jump and distort.

"For every one in the light, there's a hundred hiding in the dark," Bolivar said, eyes sparking with a glittering, all-consuming rage that Larry had previously only seen in his own reflection. "Blast it! I should have _known_ they'd come here!"

Larry watched in bemusement as Bolivar began hurriedly bundling up physical blueprints, computer discs, and scale prototypes, and throwing them all into a metal briefcase. He was reminded of his own forced exodus from his home in San Francisco just hours earlier, on his father's orders. Now it was Bolivar's turn.

The universe, Larry thought, had a funny sense of humor. His mother would have appreciated it too. "Who, Dad?"

Bolivar closed the briefcase with a definitive click of the latches and scowled at nothing. "Who _else?_ The X-Men."


	10. Revelation

Note: Franklin's parting words are from "Inside," a song by - of course! - Sting. The full line is, "Love is the fire at the end of the world." That song also includes the excellent line, "Inside my head's a box of stars I never dared to open."

* * *

There should be tombstones, Rachel thought. It was the only coherent thought she could really produce at the moment. Lightheaded from a long day with no food, little rest, and much confusion, she staggered along the corridors of one of the desert facility's buildings without so much as a token resistance. It seemed... _natural_, somehow, for armed human soldiers to be roughly parading her around. Natural that her hands should be restrained and her brain buzzing with exhaustion. Even the flashing red lights and persistant, nails-on-chalkboard screech of an alarm - which hadn't started until she'd been marched inside - fit in to her expectations with no problem.

But there ought to have been tombstones on the way in. That last stretch of ground before the massive, shielded doors - there should have been rows of tombstones stretching away on both sides.

"Don't try anything, freak," one of the soldiers warned her as they turned down a long, metal- paneled hallway that was identical to the one they'd just left - and the one before that, too. Rachel nodded weary assent. She wouldn't try anything. She was still trying to figure out who she was, for heaven's sake. At least the soldiers had given her her fill of water to drink.

They passed beneath another in an endless succession of security cameras, and she glanced up briefly before returning her focus to the floor. Who was watching? What was this place? Why had there been another girl skulking around outside, and why had that other girl attacked her and turned her over to the soldiers?

Too many questions. Her head ached with them. It was starting to feel as though other voices were whispering in her mind. Maybe she was having a nervous breakdown. _That_ would cap off the day fairly nicely.

"Waiting room?" the soldier who'd called her a freak asked his partner. He had to raise his voice to be heard over the bleat of the alarm.

The other soldier, who was permanently glued to the walkie-talkie clipped to his jacket, shook his head with a laconic, "Negative. There's a visitor leaving. VIP."

"There aren't any other shielded rooms on this level," the first soldier said, plainly irritated. The other one, the one not shoving Rachel along, just made a noncommittal grunt. Rachel herself did not apparently get a vote.

"Take it up with the boss," the second soldier said. The walkie-talkie crackled to life again - the radio traffic was incessant - and he answered it swiftly. "Patrol Victor-319, go ahead."

Yet another garbled, staticky order came over the small communications device. Regardless of the alarm, Rachel didn't understand a word of it. In truth, she wasn't even trying. She felt like all the fight had been drained out of her, and a thick, heavy blanket of apathy had settled over her in its stead. What did it matter if she struggled or not? She'd still have to walk past the tombstones.

Franklin wouldn't approve of the apathy. He'd tell her to fight -

_Franklin._

Rachel stopped breathing for a moment. The young man with blond hair. Franklin. Franklin Richards, brilliant and gentle and fiercely protective of the Dream. Tiny splinters of memory pierced the gray fog and jabbed at her heart. He had loved her; she had loved him more than anything. Franklin, Franklin...

He'd told her something, and she'd clasped the words to her soul. "The fire of the world." No. That wasn't it. The fire... The fire at the _end_ of the world.

She heard Franklin whisper: _"You're the fire at the end of the world."_

"Collar's almost here," the second soldier announced to his partner, silencing his walkie-talkie. He stopped walking a few yards from a sealed blast door and Rachel, along with the other soldier, stopped too. "We wait."

"Those things don't work," the first soldier said, now disgusted as well as irritated. "Never have."

Rachel felt hollow inside; hollow but filled with a roaring, jumbled noise. She raised her head and looked around swiftly, breathing shallow and fast, trying to find the source of the chaos. The noise began to resolve itself into individual thoughts - not hers, no, not hers, but the mind-voices of the soldiers standing around her.

Franklin, she cried out in her own panicked thoughts, is this what I do? Could she hear thoughts? Could she _control_ thoughts?

The answer came as soon as she asked her questions. "Yes," she breathed, panic forgotten under a soothing wash of calm. All was right, all was well; she knew what she could do. That was the way Franklin had always made her feel.

"Shut up, freak," the soldier said crossly, prodding her ungently with his gun. And then three things happened at once.

One: The blast door in front of them slid open and two huge men in black suits loomed in the doorway. One of them was carrying a chunky circular band with circuitry visible on the interior.

Two: Rachel finally isolated the thoughts of the soldier who kept calling her a freak and learned both that he was afraid of her, and that the collar in the big man's hand was meant for her neck.

And finally: She panicked.

It was a wild and primal reaction to a stimulus she had, until that moment, forgotten. She remembered the weight on her neck, the pain stabbing into her nervous system whenever a human soldier felt like pressing a button, the fear and hatred. Rachel jerked back and the collar inexplicably exploded, showering the men with sparks and burnt pieces of metal and plastic.

The two soldiers of Patrol Victor-319 reacted with admirable speed and decisiveness. They brought their weapons up and the second one barked, "Emergency assist!" into the walkie-talkie and to the big men, who brushed off their suits and began to stomp towards Rachel.

But before either soldier could aim, Rachel _thought_ at them. She shoved against the fragile barriers of their artificial psychic shields, which shattered like spun sugar against her assault, and then she shoved at their minds. Defenseless, they cried out and clutched at their helmets.

Rachel tried to draw her thoughts back and found she couldn't untangle all the way from the soldiers'. She panicked for a moment, but then remembered in a rush of relief - it was so simple! - and pulled clear. She snapped back into herself with a sharp inhalation of breath.

The two soldiers were lying on the floor, curled into fetal positions, their fingers gripping their temples in a white-knuckled effort to stop the pain that was entirely and literally only in their minds.

She felt a moment of pity. Then the first of the two black suits reached her, and it was all she could do to dodge the surprisingly quick lunge of his meaty arm. If they caught her, she would probably be knocked out until they could lock a collar around her neck and short out her ability to see thoughts.

It was almost impossible to get out of a collar once it was locked on. She remembered. She also remembered Franklin's warm hands on her neck, gently smoothing the skin there that hadn't felt air or sun or touch since the collar had been locked into place a decade earlier.

The man made another grab for her, and Rachel scrambled backwards, stumbling over the fallen soldiers. She tripped on a protruding gun barrel and fell, hard, to the floor. Now she was trapped, lying on her side with her hands cuffed behind her back, and the two mountains of muscle evidently knew it, because they slowed their advance to an ominous, unstoppable pace.

It had worked pretty well on the soldiers, so Rachel took a deep breath and prepared to tear into the men's minds. She pushed out - and met a barrier, like an endless curving wall of smooth glass, absolutely impenetrable. She gathered up all her strength, imagined blasting the wall to pieces, imagined melting the glass beneath the fury of her assault, imagined destroying the minds that lay beyond.

Nothing happened.

The men exchanged glances and then continued their advance, completely unfazed.

It was almost as though they didn't _have_ minds, but of course they did. She was just too weak to batter her way in. But that left her out of luck. Rachel's stomach lurched - how could she fight these men whose minds were beyond her reach? Her hands were tied behind her back, and it wasn't as though she had any other weapon -

But she did, she realized. The collar had exploded; that was _her_ doing. She could do the same to her handcuffs. She could do the same to the men.

Now that she remembered how to, Rachel focused her thoughts to a narrow razor-edge and sliced them along the metal binding her wrists. The handcuffs fell to the floor with a loud, ringing clatter. She glanced down; she'd broken them in half.

"She's unrestrained," the man on the right said, as Rachel scrambled to her feet and rubbed vigorously at her sore and reddened wrists.

"Termination will be necessary," the man on the left said. They simultaneously stopped and reached into their suit jackets, pulling out compact, matte-black handguns that all but vanished in their ham fists.

"_No!_" Rachel shouted - not in fear, but defiance - and flung out her arms, fingers splayed.

The air around her seemed to ripple outward. She _felt_ the mass of the men in the black suits as a weight against her mind, and then she pushed a little harder and they were knocked off their feet. One thudded into the wall with enough force to wrench the metal panels out of alignment.

Breathing hard, Rachel lowered her hands and stared at what she had done - at the armed and dangerous men she had flattened with a thought, with a gesture and a shout. The blood was a rushing tide in her ears that drowned out all the other noises, even the klaxons.

Not a tide. A _song_. Deep and thrumming, awakening an ancient fire in every cell of her body. It was a song that could crack the heavens. It was a song that would drive gods to madness with its lure of infinities.

It's the song of my power, she thought wildly. And her mother's power before her -

"Halt!" a soldier yelled, breaking Rachel off in mid-memory. She swung round to face him, bringing her hand up just in case, but he only had a walkie-talkie in his hands. The obligatory rifle was still slung over his back.

Spurred by instinct more than fear, Rachel turned and fled in the direction that her captors been going, leaving the soldiers and the big men to recover as best they might. The new soldier cried out again - a call to other comrades - but she turned a corner and was out of danger for a while. The corridors twisted around and back on themselves, making a maze. She picked a door at random and burst through it, then clattered down the narrow stairway on the other side. One floor, then another, then another...

She had to fix something, Rachel realized as she ran. For Franklin - she had to _fix_ it. But what was she supposed to fix? It was here, whatever it was. She'd been right, when she'd sent Albert Jethro away: It was no mistake that she was _here,_ in this desert, in this facility. She could strike out with her thoughts and make steel handcuffs shatter at will. She was the one who was going to fix it. Whatever "it" was.

But then who was the other girl, and what was she here for?

She should have gone up, not down, she saw belatedly. But it was too late; already the stairwell above her was coming to noisy life with the stomping of soldier's boots, audible even over the shrill alarm. Her mistake would be compounded if she didn't get out of the stairway and find some place to take cover. She came to a halt at the next landing and tried to open the door.

It was locked.

Rachel hit her frustration limit abruptly. "Open, you stupid thing!" she snarled at it, and reached for the handle not with her hand, but her mind. The door was promptly yanked clean off its hinges and flung itself towards her. She barely sidestepped it - the edge nicked the sleeve of her jacket - and let the thing fall. The door mangled the relatively flimsy stairway and made a hellacious amount of noise on its crashing way down. But she was through the gaping doorway and running down the corridor beyond.

Breathing was like inhaling fire, and the muscles of her legs, already tired by a long desert hike, were protesting loudly. She gritted her teeth and pushed through it. The lights went out for a moment and she was running in pure ink, then came humming back on. The corridor was dimmer than it had been and she saw that only one in four lights was functioning. The noisy alarm was gone as well, and she found herself hugely grateful for the chance to _think_.

Then her vision wavered.

It was a bit like opening her eyes underwater: the world seemed to blur and melt away into indistinct shapes and colors. She blinked, and her sight returned, but she was no longer in the middle of a vast pseudo-military base.

Instead, she was running down a sunlit hallway with a wooden floor, running to a room at the end that smelled of lemons and old books, running to help - someone. It was a memory, she realized, and grabbed at it desperately. But the real world swam back into focus, replacing wood with metal, replacing sunshine with fluorescent bulbs, replacing lemons with motor oil.

The corridor abruptly gave way to a catwalk flung across a cavernous space. The room stretched away above and below her for a staggering distance. Rachel craned her neck upwards, trying to find the top. Then she looked down over the flimsy railing to see how far she could fall.

A long way. A long, _long_ way.

"Subject acquired on level fifteen, repeat, level fifteen! Catwalk on the north end!"

She turned and saw a soldier with his walkie-talkie raised and his eyes wide in panic. Behind him were a dozen soldiers armed with rifles, not communications gear.

"We need a unit _now!_" he shouted into the walkie-talkie. The soldiers behind him brought their weapons to bear. A dozen red tracer beams centered on her torso.

But then Rachel was back in the palace of her memory. She saw a man in the sunlit room at the end of the hallway, sitting in a wheeled chair in front of a smashed wall, calling out with a calm voice to the army on the lawn. Asking them to please cease their needless hostilities. It was the man she'd come to help, the man she adored as a second father since her own father had gone away forever. Just like her mother.

And she saw the soldiers on the lawn aim, and red lights bloomed on the man's chest, and then the soldiers fired -

The rage was an explosive thing that threatened to devour her soul from within. Furious at the universe, she pushed out with her mind, as hard as she could - so hard that she hurt herself - and the soldiers clustered in the mouth of the corridor suddenly flew backwards a good fifty yards. The metal in her path warped and dented away from her with an agonized squeal, like a living thing. She lifted clear of the of the catwalk and balanced there on nothing but thoughts. Thoughts and anger. The fire of her heart.

For a moment she felt pure and invincible, a cosmic avenger shining with righteous fury, and then engines roared in the great void behind her. Rachel spun in mid-air to see a huge metal robot rising just beyond the catwalk.

It was a Sentinel.

She had only seconds before it acquired her as a target and proceeded to carry out its programming, which was to execute any mutant in its presence. She hadn't seen one yet, in this facility, but she knew exactly what it was, she knew exactly how it worked, she knew its weaknesses and what its voice would sound like if this early model _had_ a voice.

She knew. She remembered, fully and completely. At the sight of the robot, the memories broke through the gray fog as though a dam had burst, burying her under a torrent of history that she marveled at - how could she have forgotten? She remembered her parents, her family, her friends, the camps, the escape, the Sentinels. She remembered the hours spent with her one true love. She remembered what and who she could become.

And over the roar of the Sentinel's engines came the sound of her exhilarated laughter.

The robots didn't stand a _chance_.


	11. Search and Destroy

Note: Although I actually like the TAS version better, the original line was, "Well, bub, Wolverine is virtually unkillable. Wolverine's claws are adamantium, the strongest metal known - capable of slicin' through vanadium steel like a hot knife through butter." That of course from Wolverine, scaring the bejeezus out of a Hellfire Club lackey during the Dark Phoenix Saga.

And yeah, I think X23 could do what Wolverine (in "Day of Reckoning") couldn't. HYDRA had her for fourteen years. That equals a lot of destruction...

* * *

Everything was going fine until the alarms sounded.

When they did, X23 was paused, crouching, at a junction in a hallway midway down the long shaft of the factory building. She was carefully timing the sweep of a security camera that she was going to have to avoid if she wanted to remain undetected, and fingering the remaining neural scramblers in her inner pocket that were going to knock out the rest of the guards in her path.

The stimulus overload of sudden flashing lights and blaring sound scrambled her senses for a split second; she almost lost her balance, but fourteen years of HYDRA training kept her steady.

She recovered just as fast and couldn't suppress an angry growl. _She_ hadn't set off the alarms, she knew that. She was far too cautious. The most likely culprit was Rachel-with-short-red- hair, doing something stupid to the guards who'd hauled her away. X23 had not been counting on Rachel going quietly, not exactly, but her plans rarely fell apart altogether and it set her blood to boiling that this one had. Now every guard would be alerted. Now every _Sentinel_ would be alerted.

That sent prickles of fear shivering down her spine along with the usual adrenaline. Fear was something she didn't get a lot of in battle; it was impossible to be afraid of things that she had destroyed over and over and over in training. She could only fear what she hadn't been trained to fight.

She hadn't trained against Sentinels.

X23 shook off the fear the way she shook off injury and sprinted down the corridor with its now-meaningless camera. She would proceed with her plan and deliver the EMP generator to the centermost point of the bottom level. There she would trigger it and fry every circuit within twenty miles, including the complex wiring of the Sentinels. The hoards of data on Trask's computers would become so much dust.

She'd lost the element of surprise - she'd lost her ambush - but she could still run her prey down. She would have to. The stammering junior SHIELD officer had been very specific: It would happen within the next twenty-four hours. Judging from what she'd seen since infiltrating the base, it would happen much sooner than that. She was in fact beginning to think that she might have missed the deadline after all.

But it was too important. It was more important than her escape, or destroying HYDRA one facility at a time. It was something that Wolverine would have done. It was her chance at redemption - it was her chance to save a world that, she had begun to dimly perceive, she was a part of.

And above all of that, it was her chance to secure her own survival for another handful of days.

The guards she'd been trying to avoid stepped out into her path, and she lost precious minutes fighting past them. Protecting the EMP generator added a layer of difficulty that she had to compensate for, and then she made it harder on herself by trying not to kill. She was _supposed_ to kill - it was faster and cut down on nasty surprises later. But Wolverine hadn't killed in years and still managed to be efficient. She was curious, if she could be curious about anything, to see what it would be like to not kill during a mission. She wanted to outdo him.

His record would stand for a while, though, because she finally lost her patience and stabbed the last guard through the chest. Blood gurgled up and she pulled back her claws quickly, stepping away before the crimson could splash all over her. The scent would stick with her and be more of a distraction than an incentive.

The guard slumped to the floor and she ran on, trying to remember where she was. The factory was a huge rectangular shaft that went down for several hundred meters, surrounded by auxiliary buildings that were only on the surface. What she wanted was a fast way down, but the alarm probably meant that the entire base was locked down tight and filling with armed guards. She could fix _that_.

She stopped cold in the middle of the hallway and pulled the remote detonator from one of her jacket's many deep pockets. A press of her thumb and the explosives she'd scattered around the auxiliary buildings blew all at once. Another press, and the same thing happened to the explosives placed more carefully inside the main generator building.

The lights went out.

They came back on immediately, of course, but not all of them; the flashing red alarm lights were gone, and most of the normal fluorescents too. Also missing was the screeching, incessant klaxon, for which her hypersensitive ears were grateful. The factory held a backup power station on one of its many levels; it would keep the emergency lights on for hours. Or until the EMP blast hit.

Having evened the odds slightly - not that she thought about it that way; it was just another trick she had been taught to perform - X23 made her way down the corridor to the point where it terminated. A jutting platform ringed with a tall railing. She could see the floor; it was roughly four hundred meters down, too far to jump without incurring substantial injury. She didn't have time for injury.

She vaulted over the railing, popped her hand claws, and let gravity pull her down the wall in a controlled slide. On the way down she heard guards shouting, saw them gesturing at her, and realized she was about to get a big obstacle thrown in her path.

It didn't matter. She had a mission to complete and only her own death could stop her.

She hit the ground and bent her knees to take the impact, retracted her claws at the same moment. The guards opened fire halfheartedly; they were too far away to hit her and they knew it. She knew it too, and didn't duck or move to shield herself. Instead she stood her ground and looked up at the sound that was descending towards her. The obstacle. She smelled fuel and oil and hot metal - the perfume of a hundred thousand days in HYDRA training.

The Sentinel fired its retrorockets and made an incongruously graceful touchdown. The floor, empty except for X23, shook anyway. Its glowing yellow eyes flashed momentarily brighter and it took a first step in her direction, making a loud, metallic thud echo across the floor.

She ran straight for it.

The action wasn't as suicidal as it seemed. The key against defeating large opponents wasn't strength, but speed. When the element of surprise was lost, a small fighter had to rely on her speed, her instinct, and her temper. X23 had all three in abundance, plus the experience to make them useful.

She aimed for the space between the Sentinel's ponderous metal legs, jumped, tucked her feet up, and stretched her arms out. The claws on her right hand did little more than superficial damage, but she scored a good hit on the other leg, her claws biting deep into the metal, then landed in an practiced crouch behind the robot.

The Sentinel turned, but X23 was already darting around its ankles again, this time jumping to inflict a gouge on the upper outside portion of the right leg. Right now she had a plan to whittle the robot down while protecting the precious cargo on her back. In a few minutes, fueled by adrenaline and the pain of a few broken bones, the plan would disappear into a fog of blood-red, pounding rage, and then the Sentinel would _really_ be in trouble.

She ducked a poorly-aimed blast from the Sentinel's hand - wide-spectrum lasers didn't pack much of a punch anyway - and, dodging more blasts, put some distance between them. Making it walk, just like making it shoot at her, would force it to burn fuel; the things didn't come with an unlimited supply. No robot did.

She stopped in the shadow of the big hydraulic lift, which had been frozen a few levels up and abandoned. The Sentinel caught up with her a few moments later and they traded blows in a dance that X23 played out with consummate skill.

Her heart was pounding, her blood was running hot, and she reveled in the violence. This was what she did. This was _her_. HYDRA might have given her the training and the tools, but she had held the seeds of it all along.

She was the ultimate predator - a pinnacle of evolution - perfectly designed to fight and kill. And although she barely knew the word, or the emotion that it described, she _loved_ it.

The Sentinel was quick, and foreign to her training, and she had some trouble pinpointing the really vital spots on its body. She finally managed to scale its back and rip a sizable gap in the metal, raked her claws across internal machinery. Wires and fuel lines were severed, parts were damaged, and the Sentinel made a low chugging noise and attempted, belatedly, to swat her away. X23 jumped off, towards the soaring metal wall; she stabbed the claws on her left hand and foot into the wall and hung on, watching to see the damage cascade play itself out.

A flurry of sound and movement high overhead caught her attention, and, feeling relatively confident in her victory, she momentarily took her attention from the robot to see what was going on.

Three more Sentinels were engaging a lone figure in the middle of the main shaft; all four were airborne and the battle shifted back-and-forth across the open space. The mutant, surrounded by a bright yellow-white glow visible even to X23, was holding the robots at bay and somehow scoring a few hits at the same time.

Closer at hand, the Sentinel on the floor opened one arm and fired a blistering salvo of white-hot lasers, and X23 found herself too preoccupied with ducking to allow for any more staring. None of the lasers hit the generator, but some of them hit _her_, and even though they were quick injuries to heal, they _hurt_, and she howled involuntarily.

The Sentinel clomped closer and let loose a fresh barrage of lasers. X23 took another glancing hit, singing her hair, then pulled her claws out of the wall and leapt for the robot. The Sentinel, moving faster than she'd expected, blasted her to one side with a shot from its hand. It was more of a blow to her pride than anything else, and it made her precarious control over her anger slip another notch.

She turned mid-air and got her feet under her, slid to a crouching stop on the smooth metal surface of the hydraulic lift. The Sentinel followed up on its lucky shot with more unanticipated speed. It extended one hand and grabbed her. And squeezed.

Her claws could not shatter under any set of conditions. But her flesh could rupture, and caught between the fingers of a giant metal hand, it would. Before that, though, the EMP generator would give - and it did.

She felt a _pop!_ and then dozens of razor-sharp lacerations on her back as the generator was crushed into shrapnel. It was the sting of a plan lost beyond all hope of recovery.

X23 let out a roar of raw, unfiltered rage and sprang all of her claws at once, twisting in the vise of the Sentinel's grip to do maximum damage. The adamantium blades cut through the tempered steel as though it were tissue paper. She applied pressure from her muscles and, with a final kick of one foot, pried the hand open enough to slip free.

She dropped to the lift and jumped off the side immediately, catching hold of the edge and swinging herself underneath. Three quick, broad slashes with her hand claws severed a part of the underside that was critical to the structure as a whole. The load-bearing support buckled and collapsed with an anguished squeal as she let go and fell to the bottom-level floor. She hit the floor with a smooth tuck-and-roll that took most of the impact, and came to her feet again just in time for the lift to collapse altogether.

The Sentinel, damaged, running slow, still preoccupied with targeting her, failed to initiate its flight engines in time. The lift toppled and the robot went with it, crashing down in an unholy cacophony of booming metal. Set off by a single stray spark, the Sentinel's fuel tanks ignited a heartbeat later, and the lower levels of the factory were rocked by the ensuing explosion. X23 did not witness the robot's demise, however, because she had taken cover at the first scent of flammable liquids. Now, from the relative shelter of a corridor, she sniffed at the heavy burning smell - there wasn't anything else like it - and bared her teeth in contempt for her adversary.

She heard another explosion high above, booming and echoing off the walls, and then great chunks of flaming metal began raining down, adding to the blistering inferno on the bottom level. Already the fire was beginning to lick across the floor towards her, making sweat bead up on her forehead and beneath the leather of her uniform. There was now no choice; she would have to retreat into the corridor and find another way up.

It occurred to her to wonder who had destroyed the other Sentinel - who had been able to hold three at bay simultaneously in mid-air. Not the guards. Who else was in the base? Rachel?

She bared her teeth again, hissing this time, and abruptly decided she didn't care. Turning on her heel, she sprinted into the darkness of the corridor, which at this point had lost all power, even to the emergency lights. When the in-house backup generators went, the entire base would be plunged into perfect black.

Of course, in order for the backup generators to go, it would mean the fire would have to have eaten that far into the infrastructure of the building. Even though the darkness could only help her - she didn't need eyes, she had four other hyperkeen senses - she wanted to be gone by then.

She rounded a corner and caught a whiff of gunpowder, a human scent, and dropped flat to the floor just as the first burst of gunfire pounded into the air where she had been standing. X23 waited until the guard stopped firing, then, still lying prone, made a muffled, pained noise as if she'd been hit.

"Don't move," the guard warned, approaching her with his weapon drawn and aimed. She whimpered again and twitched a little, and the fool believed it. He got close enough to prod her shoulder cautiously with the toe of his boot, and that was far too close.

What happened next came too fast for him to react; she flipped onto her back, popped her hand claws and slashed the weapon into five segments. The pieces had barely clattered to the metal floor before she'd dropped the guard with a few deft blows to the chest and head.

She stood over his living body for a moment, looking over her shoulder at the thick scent of smoke that was beginning to drift down the corridor - and the fire that was no doubt close behind. A troubling thought had seized her, coming out of nowhere; she couldn't remember ever having it before. She had been trying to let the man survive, but with the fire closing in, he would die anyway, especially knocked unconscious. Burning was painful. Should she kill him to save him?

It was too big a question and morality too new. She stood there a moment longer, then shuddered all over like a dog shaking off water, and went to see what he had been guarding so zealously that explosions and fire had not moved him from his post.

She found a pneumatic blast door, reinforced across its front by strips of heavy material, with a DNA scan mechanism on one side. The door was impressive enough to raise the possibility that her objective lay on the other side. Human scents were all over it, one stronger than all the rest.

X23 slashed through the DNA scanner and ripped out the wires she'd exposed. Then she set to work carving an entrance in the door - not difficult, given that adamantium could cut through vanadium steel like a hot knife through butter, and the stuff the door had been made from was nowhere near as tough as vanadium steel.

When she'd hacked out enough of a gap, she slipped through and found herself in an office. Larger than the corridor, spacious enough to accommodate a lot of unnecessary junk, it clearly belonged to someone important, probably the person whose scent had been strongest. She moved through the office warily, senses on high alert. Someone - no, two people, related - had been in this space recently. One had been full of anxiety. The other was angry but not overly worried. Things had been gathered hastily, thrown together. The departure had been equally swift.

On a desk she found papers addressed to and signed by Bolivar Trask. This was it, then. She wouldn't get better access to what she wanted. And yet she couldn't find _anything_. Frustration bubbled up her spine; the information had been practically plastered all over the minor HYDRA base where she'd first seen it - the last HYDRA base she'd leveled. But here, where it was _supposed_ to be, she was finding nothing.

Her search had taken less than a minute. She moved to the computer and spent a few moments checking that, found it had been purged. Nothing of value to her, nothing pertaining to the Master Mold project, remained.

She would have to find another route. Training suggested a living source of information.

Growling softly, she returned to the hallway and found that the unconscious soldier had vanished, leaving most of his gear behind. That brought mixed feelings and she was too wired to begin to want to name them. His scent trail led away, towards an alcove she hadn't noticed before; an exit of some kind, obviously. The two scents from the office also led that way. She went to investigate and discovered an elevator, too small to be anything besides a private emergency route.

The elevator itself was gone but a ladder was bolted to one wall of the shaft, and leaning in she could perceive the guard clambering through an open door on a higher level. That explained the ditched gear - too heavy for a fast climb. He must have been playing dead as well, she realized, and felt a kind of grudging respect.

She came back to the middle of the corridor when the discarded comm gear crackled faintly to life. It had been damaged by her earlier blows and she had to crouch down to hear better. "- Trask on level fifteen, needs escort to Master Mold -"

Living source of information. Bolivar Trask met that requirement - for now.

X23 popped a claw through the comm gear to prevent anyone else from using it. The shower of sparks burned her face, but she ignored the dozens of small pains until she was certain that the equipment was destroyed. Then she turned and sprinted for the elevator, and beyond that, level fifteen.


	12. Paradigm Shift

Notes: The "we must not be enemies" line comes courtesy of the fabulous, Phoenix-tastic _X2._ Master Mold's original function in the comics is more or less as I've described it here, with the addition of mass-producing Sentinel "drones." It's worth noting that, in either an _X-Men Unlimited_ or an Annual issue - I can't remember which right now - a Sentinel that was separated from its network developed its own intelligence and sought out the X-Men (who destroyed it before they realized it wasn't an enemy; oops). Love those Sentinels...

* * *

Everything was happening too quickly for Larry. He wasn't an "action" kind of guy; he'd spent most of his life in the sheltered environs of academia, where the most exciting, heart-pounding events involved really tight deadlines. His father had been an academic too, once, before embarking on his life's work. Now Bolivar was more of a soldier than a theorist, and it showed.

"Don't gawk, Lawrence, we need to reach the surface," Bolivar said impatiently, propelling Larry down the hallway, past a large viewing window. Larry had foolishly paused to stare down in stunned amazement at a young girl dressed in black leather who was single-handedly shredding a Sentinel and most of the surrounding infrastructure. But the pressure of his father's hand got him moving again.

They ran down the hallway as fast as circumstances allowed. Larry was slowed by his relative lack of physical acumen, Bolivar by his age and the weighty metal briefcase. They hadn't left the office as fast as Bolivar obviously wished; reports had been streaming in from the security forces. His father had finally ordered the soldiers to defend their posts and leave him alone. Then the private elevator had failed along with the main generators - fortunately not in between floors - and they'd been forced to abandon it. The nearest stairway to the surface, it turned out, was on the other side of the factory, and that was quite a distance.

"How do you know it's the X-Men, Dad?" Larry managed to get out between gasps for air.

"The girl," Bolivar said, breathing slightly less heavily, "the girl upstairs is one of them. Jean Grey - she's cut her hair, but that's her."

Jean Grey, Larry repeated to himself, trying to match the grimy hitchhiker to his mental picture of the mutant terrorists. "What does she do?"

"Telepathy and telekinesis," Bolivar said dismissively. They crossed a short open-air catwalk and began running down a human-scale corridor studded with ordinary lab doors on both sides. "I'm more concerned about the unknown downstairs. She's too close to Master Mold."

A thunderous _kaboom!_ rattled the metal walls and made the floor shake slightly, adding weight to Bolivar's words.

Larry was passing familiar with the details of his father's Sentinel project; Judge Chalmers, who was Bolivar's legal counsel as well, had gotten bits and pieces for him over the years. But he'd never heard of "Master Mold," and the unfamiliar name coupled with Bolivar's blatant concern made him curious. "To _what?_"

Bolivar never got a chance to answer, as one of the doors up ahead banged open and two figures came spilling out: an obviously irate Stephen Lang and an insistent soldier in full combat gear.

"- can't leave now!" Lang was saying, in a shrill whine that made Larry wince. The scientist was nothing but annoying, and he rather enjoyed the fact that the soldier - Galindez from the checkpoint once again - had him by the arm and was dragging him bodily.

Another explosion sounded; not as huge as the first one, it also seemed to be closer.

"It's a _general evac,_ sir. The fire is uncontainable. You can't stay -" The soldier abruptly broke off and came to attention. "Dr. Trask, sir!"

Lang jerked out of Galindez' grasp and practically flung himself at Bolivar. "Dr. Trask! The project - it's not - this incompetent fool dragged me away before I could retrieve anything -"

"It's abandoned? Master Mold is abandoned?" Bolivar demanded sharply.

"We weren't able to initiate before the lockdown," Lang protested, feeble in his own defense. He was actually wringing his hands. "The unit is immobile and this _idiot_ won't let me go back for it!"

"Report, soldier," Bolivar snapped at Galindez.

In contrast to Lang's babble, Galindez said with perfect composure, "The situation has destabilized further and a general evac has been ordered. The mutant girl who escaped custody is engaging Sentinels on this level -"

Bolivar's scowl could have melted lead. "You ordered an _evacuation?_ For God's sake, why?! We have a small army camped out here, not to mention robots _designed_ to destroy mutants! With military incompetence like this, it's no wonder the government needs my assistance!"

Galindez plainly wanted to say something nasty in return, but held his tongue. Larry admired the man's restraint. In Galindez' place, with the factory falling down around his ears and two mutants running loose on a rampage, he would have thrown military decorum to the wind. As it was, he was content to stand back silently and watch the situation play out.

Instead the soldier waited a beat and finished, "And the unknown mutant on the lower level has destroyed the Sentinel tasked to her - before it could acquire a full genetic profile. Sir."

"One mutant can't destroy a Sentinel!" Lang exclaimed, incredulous. "Dr. Trask, these people are interfering with our project! Tell them to back-"

Bolivar cut him off with an impatient wave of one hand. "Continue," he ordered Galindez.

Yet another _boom,_ this one even closer. Larry looked at Lang with a curious and more than slightly suspicious eye. Either the scientist was flat-out insane, or he was gunning for "Lackey of the Year." There was no other reason to be so insistant about staying. That Lang could merely be fanatically devoted to the Sentinel project was not something that crossed Larry's mind.

The soldier nodded crisply and reported, "The fire is near the control platform. Master Mold has been secured, sir, but there was no time to retrieve it."

"That's a lie!" Lang, now closing in on hysterical, swung to face Bolivar. "It just needs to be initiated! All the systems checked out - it's ready!"

"Dr. Lang, sir, I already explained why you can't be allowed to return downstairs," Galindez said with weary, hard-tested patience. Larry wondered if the soldier was the only one in the base with any people skills whatsoever, or if he just kept drawing the short straw when jobs were being handed out.

"_Someone_ has to retrieve it," Bolivar growled. "I'm not about to let the X-Men get their hands on my life's work. Lang!"

Busy with a half-dozen nervous tics and glaring at Galindez, the scientist fairly jumped out of his skin at the shout, but sidled up quickly to Bolivar. "Yes, sir?"

"Take this," Bolivar ordered, thrusting the metal briefcase at Lang. "I'm holding _you_ responsible for the survival of this information. And my son."

Lang's eyes darted at Larry, who hadn't missed the slight; he was still less important than his father's work. Oddly, he took a small amount of comfort in the continued role of second-best. The world couldn't be over if Bolivar was still ignoring him.

Lang clutched the briefcase with the white-knuckled tenacity of a dying man - or a dedicated apple-polisher. "Don't worry, Dr. Trask, I'll keep it all safe. Your son, too."

Galindez, still all business, had reached for the communication gear on his uniform and was saying, "Dr. Trask on level fifteen, needs an escort to Master Mold -"

"Belay that," Trask said, every inch the military commander. "There's no time. I'll go alone. Get them to the surface alive."

Galindez didn't seem to like that idea any more than Larry or Lang, but he followed orders. "Yes sir."

Bolivar took a step towards the door that Galindez and Lang had exited from just moments earlier - access to a stairway leading down, not up. Framed by the doorway, he paused and looked back. "Lawrence," he said stiffly, "keep your mouth shut about what you've seen here."

Then he was gone.

"Come on, sir," Galindez said, and, before Larry could protest, lead both civilians down the hall and through a door. Larry stepped out - and found himself on a long catwalk suspended over Hell.

Black, roiling smoke had completely engulfed the bottom levels. Swathes of brilliant orange flame showed through occasionally, and the temperature was soaring ever higher. Of the girl and the Sentinel there were no signs, but Larry couldn't believe that they were still down there, in that hecatomb. He craned his neck back in search of the other mutant, Jean, and the three Sentinels _she_ was fighting. He saw her, all right, limned with a glow close in hue to the flames, but she was only facing one Sentinel. As he watched, she made a broad gesture with one arm; the Sentinel split in half and exploded.

"Mother of God," Galindez muttered, then shook his head and pushed Larry on. "Faster, sir!"

Larry moved faster, but despite his growing fear for his own survival, he couldn't shake the question: "What's Master Mold?"

"It's top-secret," Lang said archly, with just a touch of smugness. He obviously enjoyed denying Larry the information.

"It's a new Sentinel, sir," Galindez said. "Master Mold is its codename. It's designed to connect with all the Sentinels, to be the central brain. It'll take over production and make an AI network, let the robots learn at an accelerated rate. They were less than an hour away from initiation when the alarms sounded."

"How do _you_ know that?" Lang demanded, incensed. "You're just a checkpoint guard!"

Galindez' expression turned icy. "I'm _observant._ And you _scientists_ talk too much. Sir."

Ignoring the argument, Larry turned over the information. If Galindez' information was accurate - and judging from Lang's reaction, it was - then this Master Mold would be the single most important creation his father had ever set loose upon the world, second only to the Sentinels themselves. It would spell certain destruction for the mutants. No wonder the X-Men had broken in to destroy it.

They made it across the catwalk without incident but had to stop in front of the massive blast door on the other end. There was a keypad beside the door; the light mounted above the pad glowed red. Larry stood to one side while Lang self-importantly stepped up.

The scientist punched a quick series of numbers on the keypad, and the light above it switched to green, but the door itself stayed resolutely shut. "No good. It's still locked down."

"All of the locks should have sprung when the evac was ordered," Galindez said, impatient. He stepped back and pulled his comm gear free, apparently trying to find someone to chew out.

"It just won't open." Lang looked over his shoulder and blanched. "Oh no -!"

Larry looked back too, and saw the girl in black leather who'd destroyed the Sentinel. She was crossing the catwalk in a steady, ground-eating lope that put him in mind of the big savanna predators on the Discovery Channel. Two long, curved metal blades sprouted from the backs of each of her fists. She looked like the avatar of Death.

"You should try the door again," Larry said to Lang, who made a distressed, panicked noise and did, in fact, try the door again. Frantically. Galindez dropped his comm gear and edged his hand towards his rifle.

The girl stopped several meters away, growling. "Where's Bolivar Trask?" she demanded.

"Why are you _doing_ this? What do you want with my father?" The words burst out of Larry before he could stop to ask himself why he was saying them, why he was worried about his father. He hated his father.

"_Where's Trask?_" she repeated, eyes flashing anger, as if he hadn't spoken.

"Saving the machine that's going to stop you," Lang said. It wasn't very loud - he didn't have those kinds of guts - but the girl heard him anyway, because her face twisted into a mask of rage and she suddenly darted forward.

Galindez moved to match her, to defend the two civilians under his protection. He managed to unsling his rifle, but the girl sent it spiraling into the fiery void with one high kick. Galindez scrambled backwards to join Lang and Larry at the door. The girl followed swiftly and came to a halt just over a meter away from Larry. She met his eyes.

"Your father is evil," she said. She had a girl's voice, high-pitched, but there was a savage bite on each of the words that belied the youthful tone. "He needs to die. I'm going to kill him."

Galindez whipped a handgun from his belt and coolly, professionally, shot her full in the chest.

The girl staggered backwards, grunted - and met Larry's eyes again with undiminished hate. "You too," she snarled.

"Oh, God," Lang said, fumbling with the door controls again. But it wouldn't open, and Larry swallowed down a sudden rush of wild, disbelieving terror at the knowledge that he was actually going to die. The girl's claws flashed and she tensed to leap.

There was a great rush of flames, although no heat radiated from them, and then a blindingly bright light. When Larry had blinked his eyes clear, he saw the red-haired hitchhiker standing in between himself and the first girl, who was now apparently frozen in mid-motion.

"Killing them won't solve anything, X23, and neither will fighting me. We must not be enemies, but friends," she said to the other girl, urgent. "_We must not be enemies._"

The girl with the claws made a frustrated grunting noise and struggled against whatever it was that had her trapped. The redhead watched with a touch of sadness in her eyes, then turned to face the three men.

"Jean?" Larry asked. He wondered how someone so pale and thin could blow a Sentinel apart with a gesture, could absolutely dominate the space around them simply by _being_.

"That's half-right. I -" She broke off suddenly, grabbing at her temples with a grimace. Her features seemed to flicker, and then black slashes appeared across her face without warning, like instant tattoos. It should have been ugly - her entire face, save her eyes and mouth, was covered by the marks - but the radiating pattern was merely striking instead. She straightened and took her hands from her head; her features smoothed out into neutrality. "I'm not Jean."

"Then who -?" Lang started, probably burning out his entire lifetime's worth of courage.

"You should run," the red-haired girl interrupted, but her voice was as casual as if she was discussing the weather. She flicked her fingers and the blast door whooshed open at his back, sending a rush of cool air over his body. "Go ahead - we won't stop you. And Larry -"

Larry flinched, surprised she knew his name.

The girl's expression became faintly amused behind her tattoos, and her green eyes sparked. "Don't take off your mother's medallion anymore."

Now slightly outraged, Larry opened his mouth to demand how she knew about his mother's medallion, but an invisible wall pushed them all backwards and then the blast door slammed shut in their faces, cutting them off.

"Come on," Lang said, edging away like he wanted to run.

"I'm not leaving my father," Larry said fiercely. It thrummed through him like a mantra: _I'm not leaving my father, I'm not leaving my father... _ The medallion felt warmer than usual where it lay against his skin.

"Yes you are, sir," Galindez said, raising his weapon and aiming it in Larry's general direction. "I don't want to have to hurt you, sir, but my orders are only to get you out alive."

Lang had clutched the briefcase to his chest and was clearly about to bolt. "There's nothing we can do. Let's go!"

Larry glanced at Galindez, who looked more than capable of shooting out someone's kneecap, then at Lang, who was oozing panic and cowardice. He wanted to break down the door and chase after his father, and forget the two mutants standing in his way. He may have hated the man, but Bolivar was all he had left, and the girl in black leather wanted to kill him. He had to _do_ something. It wasn't love that was driving him, but fear; and fear was sometimes the more powerful motivator. He had to _do_ something. He had to go help his father.

But it wasn't going to happen.

"You have three seconds, sir," Galindez said, regretful but firm. His finger was on the trigger and his aim had not wavered.

"Let's go," Larry said. The words tasted bitter in his mouth; he almost gagged on them. He had no choice, he recognized that, but if anything happened to his father, he knew he would never forgive himself for this moment of weakness.

Galindez holstered his weapon and grabbed Larry by the arm despite his agreement to leave, pulling him along forcibly on their flight towards the surface. The trio encountered plenty of alarms and evacuating personnel as they went, but no additional mutants.

Galindez' fellow checkpoint guards had taken charge of the motor pool, summoning, loading, and dismissing vehicles. Thanks to their efforts, the mass exodus was taking on an almost orderly pace - almost. Most of the auxiliary buildings seemed to have been evacuated completely, and only the main factory building remained. Klieg lights and ground flares were scattered around, but the darkness in the canyon was vast. That, and the fire and damage inside, were probably slowing the process down.

"Stay here, sirs," Galindez ordered Larry and Lang, then went to have a quick, jargon-filled chat with his guard buddies. A few big military helicopters buzzed overhead - taking off rather than setting down. They kicked up a momentary swirl of wind and sand, making everyone who was still waiting for a ride out cover their eyes and mouths, then faded into the night with only the rhythmic slap of rotors to betray their position.

Through the crowd and the dust, Larry unexpectedly caught sight of Judge Chalmers and called out on instinct. "Judge! Judge, over here!"

"Larry! Thank heavens," Chalmers exclaimed, making his way over quickly. Pale and shaken, he grabbed onto Larry as if the younger man was a liferaft; the feeling was somewhat mutual. "Where is your father?"

Larry looked over his shoulder at the chaos - the swarming lab coats and soldiers, nearly all of them carrying something: clipboards, documents, rifles, equipment. "He's still in there."

Chalmers paled further and opened his mouth to say something, but before he could, Galindez returned and began hustling them towards a car. Larry recognized it as the sedan One and Two had used to deliver him to the factory in the first place; more irony. His suitcase, he suddenly realized, was still in the trunk. He didn't wonder where One and Two were.

"Get in and buckle up," Galindez said, himself taking the driver's seat and strapping in. "I got priority exit - we're leaving _now_."

Larry gave up the front seat to Judge Chalmers and scrambled into the backseat with, unfortunately, Stephen Lang. Galindez barely waited for the doors to shut before switching on the engine and flooring the accelerator. The tires spun in the thin, rocky dirt with a painful squeal and then the sedan roared forward, past the other vehicles waiting to get out of the canyon on the sole road.

Poor planning, Larry thought wildly, poor planning to have only one road. He had too many thoughts flying through his mind, too many to pin down any of them for more than a moment -

"I'm sure Bolivar will be fine, son," Chalmers told him.

Larry wasn't sure. In fact, his heart was pounding and the lightheaded feeling was back in full force, and the knowledge that his father was not going to make it out stabbed at him. He gripped the medallion hard enough for the ridges of the metal to cut into his fingers. "I shouldn't have left," he said, voice strained. "I should've stayed."

"There was nothing we could do." That from Lang, huddled in the far corner of the backseat, still clutching the metal briefcase to his skinny chest as though it could shield him. "There's nothing we can do," he said again.

Larry wanted to grab the man, shake him, shout at him, "You don't understand, that's all the family I have!" but the words and emotions jammed up on each other and he couldn't get them out. All he could do was twist around in the seat and stare through the rear window, at the vehicles jolting along the road behind them, at the doomed factory behind that.

The smoke billowing out of the factory suddenly increased, and then the entire main building erupted in a huge, brilliant fireball. For a moment the fire seemed to take on the shape of a bird - a bird with claws and an open, screaming beak - but it was gone so quickly that it might have been a trick of the light.

"No," Larry said. His voice was almost lost beneath the roar of the explosion and the roar of the engine, even when he repeated more loudly, "NO!"

"Dear Lord," Chalmers said from the front seat. Galindez muttered a prayer and pressed down harder on the accelerator. The car leaped forward and whipped around the last curve of the canyon, and then they were back on the desert highway, speeding towards the midnight horizon.

"There's nothing we can do," Lang said, sounding almost as strangled as Larry wanted him to be. "No one could have survived that."

No one. Not even Dr. Bolivar Trask.

For the first time since his mother's funeral, Larry broke down and cried.


	13. Manifest Destiny

Notes: There's an epilogue coming, but it has its own huge notes, so I'll blather a bit here. When I first started writing this fic, I was like, "No Evo fan is going to want to read this - it's got only two minor Evo characters, and a bunch of 616-canon characters who've never appeared in the Evolution universe at all. And no 'fun' stuff! ...Why am I writing this again?" But obviously, people did read it, and liked it (I hope!), and I'm very grateful for that.

So thank you to all of my reviewers: Rurouni Tyriel, Neva, jacob, Illmantrim, Lyranfan, the mildly anonymous "me", and anyone else whose name I've forgotten here. There's no joy like getting a review, and y'all have each made my day more than once. If I wasn't so awkward with feedbacking my feedbackers, I would've told you this sooner.

For those wanting more, well, this fic is Part One of a projected (may I emphasize _projected_) trilogy, and Parts Two and Three are supposed to have a lot more of the X-Men. And even some fun. :)

Rachel's "darkness/light" line in this chapter is actually a slightly paraphrased quote from the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., may he rest in peace. "The Chaos-Bringer" is a bonafide 616 nickname for the Phoenix. And a raptor is a bird of prey. Just in case, y'know, someone thought I was talking theropod dinosaurs.

* * *

Now alone on the catwalk, with only the crackle of flames and the scent of heavy smoke for company, Rachel pressed the palms of her hands to X23's temples, making a physical connection to bolster the psychic one. What she was about to do was in theory far more complicated and strenuous than merely overloading a couple of soldiers, or demolishing a few Sentinels - although probably not so in reality, given the way her power level was surging ever higher.

"X23? X23, listen," she said out loud and in her mind. "This is important. Don't fight me."

That was like asking the sun not to rise, but she had to make the attempt. X23 struggled against the telepathic link with her own psychic defenses. It was surprising to see the strength of the fortifications that the other girl, a non-telepath, could bring to bear against an attacker: walls, mazes, mines, and a few deviously hidden traps that could take out all but the most skilled mind-readers.

Rachel overpowered her with a single thought.

Listen, she said into the other girl's mind. _Listen to me... _

X23 wailed out a refusal in the language of a small, lost child - scared and angry but mostly scared. Rachel soothed the girl's mind-self with a wave of positive emotion. _Listen, listen to me - this is the story you have to know. This is your story too..._

It started with a mother who vanished almost as soon as she appeared - and a father who stayed around for a while longer, sunk in grief and grim determination, sustained by the ever-receding hope for victory. And then he too failed to come home one day and everyone had cried, and she'd been taken in by her aunts and uncles - her parents' friends - and spent her days absorbed in the task of learning how not to become the Chaos-Bringer.

Then there was the day the soldiers stormed the house, the mansion, the school. Stormed it and taken no prisoners but herself. She was too valuable to kill. She was going to become their ultimate weapon.

After that point the memories became dark and jumbled, fragments of a time she wanted desperately to forget. They swirled past in a mad, headlong rush, end-over-end, almost going too fast to be perceived. Torture. Brainwashing. The proprietory tattoos branded on her face. The long, black days of crouching inside herself, zealously guarding the spark of awareness against prying eyes until the right moment. And then the exhiliration of breakout - freedom at last!

She soared up all over again, remembering, and felt X23 add a joyous howl in agreement.

But then immediately came recapture, and this time they had no use for her, their broken weapon. They threw her away, into the refuse of the internment camps where the last sorry remnant of her family clung to life with an iron grasp. She found them again, or rather they found her: Kate and Piotr and Ororo, and even their old enemy-friend Erik. And there in the camp, beneath the ponderous weight of her neural inhibitor collar, under the watchful eyes of the Sentinels, she met Franklin.

Rachel tried to show X23 how important he was, but the other girl did not understand; she was too dazzled by the bright strangeness of love to understand that it was the only force in the universe that could bind the Grey women.

Birds mated for life. Even firebirds.

Time passed - years - too short, but happy in their own way. All the while there was planning, secrets, conspiracies hatched in the recesses of their camp shacks. Aid from the distant Canadian Resistance came in the form of bits of electronics for Franklin, her genius, who would get them out of there on cleverness alone. And then the word came down that it was time. Time for action. Time for the X-Men to rise from their own ashes.

Breakout again, fleeing through the streets, running and fighting their way to the bitter end.

The end... when the Wolverine and the last of the true X-Men were cut down by the Sentinels, and it was just Franklin and herself, and after years of neglect, he had forgotten how to use the reality-bending powers of his birthright. So had she, for a different reason - the distaste of being a weapon, the refusal to be one again. Finally he'd found what was left of his powers, right before the Nimrod unit came crashing in, and pushed her into _becoming,_ and she had landed hours and miles from where she should have because neither of them had been any good at aiming. And that took them up to the ephemeral point called _Now._

Rachel brought both herself and X23 back into the real world, and broke the mental connection; the physical one had already been severed. She was still standing, but X23 had collapsed to the floor of the catwalk and curled into a fetal position, no doubt trying to protect herself from the inundation of her mind.

"Sorry for that - speed over style. It's called a memory dump," Rachel explained, helping X23 stand. "Not the most elegant term, but descriptive. I telepathically downloaded my memories into your brain. They'll all fade eventually."

X23 shook her head, plainly dazed. The younger mutant wasn't much for words anyway, Rachel knew, having seen the inside of her memories during their connection. What a life - if it could be called that. And how closely it mirrored her own.

"We're sisters, X23," Rachel said. She touched the dark slashes on her face, the marks of a Hound - a hunter-killer mutant who chased down other mutants on human orders. The ultimate weapon in the war on mutants; the ultimate irony, too. She'd hidden the marks from the second she'd made her first breakout - a low-level psionic mask, nothing fancy, something an Omega-class telepath like herself could do even with a collar on. It was all part of an effort to _forget,_ but it had failed; she could remember the day she'd been marked, how the pain had only grown and the salt of her tears had made it worse. "We were both slaves - both weapons. And we both fought our way to freedom."

"Weapons," X23 said. It seemed to be the only word that she could wrap her mind around. Her fingers were twitching reflexively, trying to contract the muscles that controlled her claws, but Rachel doubted she knew it.

Claws, tattoos - brands. None so indelible as the scars on their souls.

Rachel nodded solemnly. "Sisters. You know it's true. So please trust me when I tell you that there's nothing else you can do tonight."

X23's face twisted into a snarl. "I can finish my mission."

Kate had suggested it. Ororo and Erik had approved it. Franklin had plotted it. They had all died so that Rachel could accomplish it, even big Piotr, the strongest person she'd ever known. She saw him for a moment, the way she'd seen him last: standing over her, tears coursing down his steel face for the loss of his beloved Kate, shouting incoherently at the Sentinels and shielding Rachel and Franklin with his body, with his last fragile spark of life.

Her power hiccuped, tried to surge over her barriers. She forced it down and shook her head. "It's _my_ mission."

The younger girl's already-strained grip on civility snapped altogether. Rachel sensed the rage coming a split second before it manifested and flung another telekinetic field around X23 like a net.

"It's MY mission!" she exploded, all fury and sharp teeth, fighting against the TK field so vigorously that veins stood out on her forehead. "It's _mine_! _I_ found the reports in HYDRA base! _I_ broke into SHIELD to confirm! _I_ came here -"

"And you would already be dead," Rachel said calmly, "if it wasn't for my presence."

X23 paused in her struggle, seemingly struck by that. Rachel thought that perhaps the other girl understood - that she saw in Rachel's memories that it was the truth - and the thought translated into a momentary weakening of the TK field.

But it was all a ploy. Playing dead was the easiest ambush of all, and X23 broke the weakened field with a concentrated burst of physical effort.

The backlash hit Rachel and disoriented her enough to make the next few seconds a loss. X23 was smart and obviously well-trained against psychics. She didn't wait to confront Rachel, but instead got her feet under her and practically flew down the catwalk.

"Wait!" Rachel cried out, scrambling after her. Then she stopped. She was in no shape to catch a trained assassin, pyschic powers or not. Instead of chasing X23, Rachel closed her eyes and let her mind run for her - across the catwalk, down the hallway and the cramped stairwell... there was X23, burning with fury... and there, also were the faint afterimages of Bolivar Trask's thoughts drifting through the empty passages. His psychic aura had clung to the area, and Rachel could follow it as easily as X23 was following his scent trail. Of course, that called for a sensitivity that bordered on the godlike.

Too close, she thought nervously, I'm way too close. It was getting down to the wire and she still hadn't accomplished what she came for.

Her thought-search, running on without her conscious direction, found Trask deep inside the complex. He was standing on a movable platform, in a big box of a room that also contained a Sentinel shrouded in scaffolding and wires. Even without his thoughts to identify it, she recognized the robot from her history lessons. Bigger than a normal Sentinel, marked with different colors, it was unmistakable.

"Master Mold," she said, eyes flying open. Trask was going to activate it -

In the space between breaths she vanished from the catwalk and materialized in front of the man and his machine.

"_Stop this right now!_" she ordered.

Trask jerked back and nearly lost his footing on the platform. She was an impressive figure, she knew; bold tattoos on her face, wreathed in psychic energy that looked uncannily like fire, levitating without effort. On the other side of the room she saw real fire, and smoke, beginning to crawl across the floor. Time was running out in more ways than one.

"Not a chance, mutant," he spat, and reached for the control console just beyond his arm's length.

"I can make you stop," she said, lowering herself onto the platform and forcing Trask to back up to avoid contact with her. "I can make your brain disconnect from your body. I can make you forget your entire life. I could do anything I wanted and you wouldn't be able to lift a finger in your own defense."

Trask snorted but took another step back, resting his hands on the control console behind him. "Typical. You genetrash are all the same, Jean Grey - you and your threats of violence against defenseless humans -"

"If you'd let me _finish,_" Rachel interrupted, scowling at him. She had a terrible temper - just like her mother - and Trask was pushing his luck. "First of all, I'm _not_ Jean. If you had half a brain you would _see_ that. And I _could_ do all of those things, but I won't. Because we 'genetrash' are _not_ all the same. Some of us are -"

Trask cut her off with a venomous, "Poison in the system."

Rachel's frayed temper came dangerously close to cracking, which would spell disaster since her powers were also cresting out of her control. She fought it all down with a concentration that made her almost physically ill, but couldn't prevent herself from retorting: "The system is _nature_ and nature _erases_ its _mistakes_!"

"Sometimes," Trask said, suddenly gone cold and imperious, "nature needs help."

And with that, he reached back with one hand and defiantly pressed the button that finished Master Mold's initiation sequence. Rachel turned and saw the robot's eyes beginning to light up. She saw more than that - she saw her family destroyed, her home destroyed, her mind and body shackled, her entire dismal world, her every fear, rising into existence in the twin glow of yellow sensors. As soon as Master Mold powered up, it would go online and that would be it.

The end.

Her heart stopped; it froze. She froze. In that last vital moment, she failed. She could not use an iota of her infinite power.

A small, black shape suddenly flashed across the robot's face, breaking Rachel from her near-trance. She recognized X23 as the younger girl landed heavily on her feet on the platform and straightened, tossing her hair over one shoulder.

X23 gave Trask a smile that was half fang and half maliciousness personified. "_Boom._"

Behind her, the tiny explosive disc stuck to Master Mold's face exploded. It was a huge sound for such a little object and bounced around the room several times, making the walls and the platform shake. Rachel projected a TK shield automatically - she could make bubbles in her sleep - and protected all of them, even Trask, from the debris. The robot collapsed into an unidentifiable heap in a series of smaller failures, and was swallowed up in its own flame.

A few chunks of metal and circuitboards bounced across the floor of the platform despite Rachel's bubble, trailing acrid smoke. One rolled to a stop a few inches from Bolivar Trask's feet.

"_Animal!_" he roared, as wounded and furious as if they had killed his flesh-and-blood son - who by now, Rachel knew, was well on his way to safety. "That's my life's work you just destroyed!"

X23's slitted grin grew wider by another few teeth. Rachel stared and breathed with a relief so vast it fairly washed her away.

On this night, as everyone in Rachel's "family" knew, X23 had tried to break into the Sentinel factory, and had been killed in the process. A single mutant couldn't hope to accomplish something like that, not without a significant distraction, not without a tremendous amount of luck. And no one had been unluckier in their short, brutal life than X23.

That wasn't where the bad news ended, though. In ten years, driven by the heartless logic and intelligence of their Master Mold, the Sentinels would take over America. Then North America. And then they would set their sights on the world and start an unwinnable nuclear war in the process - but not before they systematically captured, enslaved, and killed every mutant they came across. Millions would die. Billions.

But because Rachel had been there, because X23 had lived, none of it would ever happen.

"I think it was for the best," Rachel said.

Trask's attention jerked to Rachel, and as soon as his eyes were off of X23, she made her move.

It was a fast charge, hand claws out and gleaming even in the poor light. There was no doubt in anyone's mind, least of all X23's, that she meant to kill the creator of the Sentinels, the greatest human danger to all mutantkind, the same type of person who would raise a mutant child up to be an ultimate weapon and then order it executed when it failed to obey.

"_Stop!_" Rachel cried. She put a quick hand to her temple and sent a concentrated burst of telepathy - a psibolt - at X23. It hit the younger mutant without visible damage, but her knees buckled and she collapsed at Trask's feet, boneless and spineless. Her claws retracted with a soft _snickt,_ scoring the metal floor of the platform with four thin grooves.

Her earlier speech and her action against X23 notwithstanding, Rachel had no intention of letting Trask escape now. She pinned him with a telekinetic field and knelt beside X23, helping her to sit up. She'd overdone the psibolt a touch without meaning to; it was getting harder to keep track of where her power levels were, which put urgency into her voice: "X23, you have to leave. You have to go to the X-Men."

Despite a look of intense concentration, X23's eyes were swimming in and out of focus, and Rachel knew it was an effort for her to even stay conscious. Still, X23 was Wolverine's daughter, and she demanded clearly enough, "The X-Men?"

"Go," Rachel said. "Have the old man take you to the nearest town and then go. Don't stop, don't look back. You know how important my parents are to the future - you're the only person who knows. You're the only one who can keep watch over them."

"I'm not leaving," X23 snarled, but her eyes had gone unfocused again and she was swaying where she sat. Rachel concentrated, found Albert Jethro and his dog and his truck a dozen miles away, and with a sharp stab of guilt, took away X23's right to choose.

It was too important. Someone had to be there with the X-Men. Someone had to be on that team who knew what could happen, would happen, might happen next. It couldn't be her; if she stayed, she would be placing the entire space-time continuum in jeopardy.

So it would have to be X23.

"I'm sorry," she told her new friend, her new sister, "but you are."

X23 jerked her head up, but Rachel was already teleporting the younger mutant away in a surge of flame-colored psionic energy. X23 had no choice, really, no matter whether or not Rachel teleported her, no matter whether or not Rachel buried telepathic orders inside the girl's brain.

Obedience had been engraved into the very core of X23's being from her first days. She might chafe at orders, she might delibrately act against them, but in the end she would always follow them. And never know why.

The lingering effects of the memory dump and the psibolt would slow X23 down a bit, as would the post-hypnotic suggestion she'd tacked on at the end, but the younger mutant would get to New York within the next few days. There was no longer any reason to worry about _that_.

Satisfied, if not proud, Rachel turned her attention to Bolivar Trask, who stepped backwards hastily. "Don't worry, Dr. Trask, X-Men don't kill."

"You're not one of the X-Men," Trask said, wary. He'd been listening to her after all.

"That's true," she agreed, although not without a touch of irony. She was, after all, the last X-Man, even if her camp uniform proclaimed her to be only a lowly Mutant. "But like the man said, darkness cannot put out darkness. Only light can do that."

He took another step back anyway, visibly panicked. The tattoos on her face, she knew, were scaring him more than anything else. She found it amusing. "What are -?"

"I'm going to bring you light. I'm going to bring you truth," she said, reaching out and pressing two fingertips briefly to his forehead. "The truth will set you free."

Trask's body twitched and shivered as though she'd passed an electric current through it, and then his eyes widened. Within their depths flickered the spark of revelation.

"Free," he echoed - dazed, but not dumb. Troubled, but not uncomprehending. That pleased her more than anything else she'd done in the last few hours.

She dropped her hand to his shoulder, patted it as though he were a small child. "We have to _fight_ to keep our freedom, Dr. Trask."

He nodded, still reeling from the power of the truth. She saw it from his perspective and was momentarily shaken by the amount of change: he was reevaluating his entire life, seeing things from the vantage point she had given him. Change. His ideas were undergoing a radical mutation of their own.

Bolivar Trask looked at her - and she looked through his eyes and saw not the tattooed freak of a few moments before, but a sober young woman with a halo of fire. And then the fire flared out and rushed over him, in a red-gold tapestry that swallowed all his vision.

There were flames everywhere, she saw, now that she was no longer occupied with Bolivar. The entire room was being devoured and the smoke was becoming so thick that it was interfering with her vision. She 'ported back to the catwalk instinctively, getting out of the box with its slowly burning corpse of a dead dream and a dead future. She leaned over the railing and looked out at the main shaft.

Fire and smoke were billowing freely, fueled by the grease and oil of the Sentinel assembly lines. She closed her eyes and felt out the along the structure of the building, felt the stress lines and warps and fractures; the damage that she and X23 had caused was not catastrophic, but if she had her way, the building would not maintain integrity for much longer regardless.

"It's the end of the world, Franklin," she said to the destruction. "Just me and the fire. I guess it's time for a rebirth."

Franklin, her Franklin, the young man she loved from the deepest parts of her soul, was gone - lost with a future that couldn't exist after this night. But she felt the whisper brush of his thoughts, and the warm touch of his hand, and she knew that he was still with her. Somehow.

Rachel took a breath and gagged on oily smoke. It was time for her to stop fighting the inevitable. It was time for her to let go and be carried along by the surging tide of her destiny.

It was time for a rebirth.

"I am fire made flesh," she proclaimed, voice rising in volume and confidence as she went. "I am life incarnate -!"

She flung her arms wide, rising upwards on her thoughts, and felt the psychic fire flare out all around her. The destruction had sped up, feeding on itself; debris from the falling ceiling hit her fledging fire-raptor but disintegrated against the telekinetic shield that it provided.

She could not be stopped now. Her ascent had begun in full force and in another few heartbeats, there would be no boundaries against her. The knowledge came with fear, but she pushed it away. A dark side couldn't scare her, not when she had succeeded. Not when she was rising. Not when every cell in her body was swelling with the crescendo of her song.

With a triumphant unfurling of her psychic wings, she burst through the roof and into the remains of the night. The raptor blossomed out, expanding to fill the available space-time, glowing white-hot around the comparatively small shape of her body. Where her wings brushed the rocks, the desert sand turned to glass - and yet the handful of people unlucky enough to still be trapped within the factory were unharmed by those very flames as she teleported them to safety. It was all according to her whim, her desire, her thought. The tiniest of atoms were falling under her sway.

She gathered up a goddess' spear of fiery thought and sent it plunging down, the way Ororo had once - was still - would yet - dropped lightning from the heavens.

Beneath her, the Sentinel factory exploded, and the canyon was filled with a thunderous, earth-shaking fireball that burned the sky and swallowed her raptor altogether. She touched the minds of those still watching, felt the razor pain of loss within more than one. Inside the flames of the fireball, inside her own flames, she continued the unstoppable flight of her ascent.

She soared up and up and up on an endless spiral of exhiliration as her powers unfolded to their absolute maximum limits - except they had no limits. She felt herself reaching the point of infinity, felt herself touching the entire universe all at once, all at once, and for less than a millionth of a second while she existed at her zenith, she was fire and life incarnate. Now and forever -

_I am Phoenix!_, she sang out to the universe. Her raptor threw back its head and keened a fierce hawk's call.

Three thousand miles away, in Bayville, New York, Jean Grey grabbed at her temples and cried out.

And Rachel Summers vanished.


	14. Epilogue: Three Ascensions

Notes: In the comics, Bolivar makes and gives Larry the "amulet" after Mrs. Trask's death - which Larry predicted at age five; Larry worships his father; Chalmers accidentally tears the medallion off of Larry in the middle of an argument, and the Sentinels immediately recognize Larry as a mutant; Larry has a sister, Tanya - aka Sanctity - who is a mutant time-traveler and a character from Rachel's Askani years. Also in the comics, Kate/Kitty's psyche travels into the past before Rachel does, and Rachel stays in her past/our present (until she goes into the far future to become Mother Askani and raise her "brother" Cable... that's another story...). And finally, in the comics, Franklin died _during_ the big escape, not after it, and Kate was the one who triggered Rachel's Phoenix powers. None of these things helped my fic, so they got dropped. (I took some liberties with the entire DoFP timeline, too.)

* * *

She hovered on the edges of the estate for several hours. The delay wasn't to study the security system, which she had already penetrated easily once before. It wasn't to think, either, although she had things to think about now. She found a perch in the heights of a spreading oak tree and sat, letting the wind slip fingers through her hair and blow her scent out to sea. Letting the idea of a life without pursuit - she was well and truly dead this time - settle deep into her bones.

But it wasn't in her to sit still for too long, and she climbed down while the sun was still high. Without a sound, she made her way across the grounds and into the house, and found it deserted. The faintest sounds - a humming under her feet - reached up, and she knew the students were all training. But the one she had come to see was still aboveground.

She padded on quiet cat's feet to the study at the rear of the house, opened the door without knocking. From inside the room came a rush of scents: ash and burnt wood in the fireplace, musty paper from the books, peppermint from the cup of tea sitting on the desk. Sun-warmed wood and fabric. Lingering traces of cleaning agents - fake lemon that couldn't mask real chemicals. And from behind the desk, the scents of the reason for her visit.

"Hello," the man called Professor Xavier said. He did not look alarmed and she could not detect any fear. He had known she was coming; she hadn't made an attempt to mask her presence this time. "Wolverine is not here."

She wandered around the perimeter of the room out of habit, checking for traps and bugs and danger. But all was still and quiet. "I'm not looking for him."

"Of course not." He folded his hands together over the desk, over the newspaper he had been reading. The expression on his face was calm and compassionate, and so was his tone. "How can I help you, X23?"

She came to a stop in front of his desk, hands hanging loose at her sides. One of the newspaper headlines said that there had been a massive and unexplained explosion in the New Mexican desert. She stared at it for a long moment, deciphering the words of the article in her halting, self-taught way. Former government employee Bolivar Trask was the only person missing. He was presumed dead.

She let a memory of Bolivar Trask and the fire swim past her psychic defenses, let him pick up on it, then met his eyes with her own. "I didn't destroy the Sentinel factory. Another mutant did."

One eyebrow went up. "Oh?"

He was expecting her to tell him more, but she wouldn't. It had been an offering only, to prove her good intentions, and a bluff, to hide the truth. The truth was, she didn't know why she'd done what Rachel had said - the X-Men were the last people she wanted to go to. She only knew that she had come, and now, standing in the Institute, she would have to see it through to the end. The knowledge chafed like a knotted rope around her neck.

Her fingers closed into tight, brief fists before she forced them open. "I want to stay here."

He regarded her for a moment. She couldn't tell what he was thinking. The fake lemon was irritatingly strong; it masked any scent she might have used to help her decipher the neutral look he was giving her.

"There are rules in my home," he said at last, gently. "You would be expected to follow them. Eventually, I would also like to send you to high school with the other students."

She felt the icy coiling in her stomach that signaled fear; she did not want to live with rules, and she did not want to brush against the non-mutant world. She wanted to hide away and be alone... But she wanted to stay and see it through. She wanted to be on the team and she wanted to be all alone. It was too confusing for her to sort out, so she did what amounted to instinct: she went with her orders.

Wolverine was here, and she was dead, and she was going to stay. It would not be so bad to live in Xavier's house. Not so bad. For awhile, at least. Then she could - she would - leave. And never come back.

She had one stipulation and laid it on the negotiating table now: "I'll be free to come and go."

Professor Xavier gave her a warm, sympathetic smile and touched her mind softly, showing her the truth of his next words. She snapped her psychic defenses up instantly, crushing the soft touch under a wall of bristling spikes, but he did not lose the smile, and his words still held truth: "We would never hold you against your will, X23."

The moment of her decision hung around her, shimmering in the afternoon sun, wrapping itself around her like the wings of a bird. She stripped off one glove, then the other, and held out one bare hand to the man behind the desk. And she did not know whether she meant to shake his hand or slash open his throat, but the peace she'd absorbed slowed her reactions until he had taken her fingers in his, and then the moment was past and the decision made for her.

She felt for a second the weighty hand of inevitability instead of the dry, light grasp of Professor Charles Xavier.

"Welcome," he said simply.

Larry Trask unlocked the door of his house and let himself inside. The suitcase in his hand thudded to the wooden floor gracelessly. He heard the musical crunch of breaking glass from within, but the sound meant nothing to him.

Nothing.

He was drowning in a sea of nothing.

His father was dead. His mother was dead. He was all alone. And there was only one place to put the blame.

He had not loved his father, that was true, but perhaps he had. Regardless, he felt lost without the man's presence in the world, no matter how remote and uncaring.

Methodically, silently, he went through the house, turning on lights, checking the thermostat, all the things he had done every day since he was thirteen and his life alone had begun. He'd thought he was alone, anyway. That aching feeling could not begin to compare to the raging abyss inside him now.

He fixed himself a meal and ate it, despite the fact that he was not hungry and it tasted like ashes. In the silence of his house he could hear the explosions, the alarms, the shouts and cries. He could see the flames and smoke of the final explosion spread itself across his vision, replaced a heartbeat later by a brilliant firebird.

One place to put the blame. One faction that was guilty. One way to ease his pain.

After the meal, he went into the study and flipped on his computer. He sat for a moment, staring at the blue screen, thinking of the blueprints in his father's office, of the space station that only he knew about now, and then he booted up his design program and began to draw. He drew robots. Better robots. Robots the mutants would not be able to destroy.

His anger grew as he worked, mercifully leaching into the nothingness and taking away some of its crushing weight, and his mind raced over plans. He could get Judge Chalmers to handle the public face of things - he could approach the government and ask for his father's contract - he could build an army. Yes - his own army, and install it in the space station, and use it to gain revenge against the mutants who had torn away from him the last remnant of his family.

X-Men, his father had named the intruders.

So the X-Men would be the first to go.

It was more than right that he should be the one to avenge his father; it was perfect. Undeniably clear. The path he would take was laid out for him like a blueprint of destiny - the fate he'd been fighting with in the dark for his entire life. In the flickering, ash-choked light of the explosion, that fate had become welcome.

As he drew the next generation of Sentinel robots, his mother's medallion glinted in the pale light of the computer. He did not know it, but the medallion emitted a tailored low-grade radiation that his mother the expert, fearful of her husband's project, had concocted especially for her only child. He did not know it, but even as his mind seethed with thoughts of revenge against the mutants, the medallion continued to mask and suppress his own mutation.

Just as it always had. Just as it always would, until the moment of his death.

If Lawrence Trask had taken off the medallion, he would have known exactly how fast that moment was coming.

Rachel felt the world slow and coalesce around her, gathering substance and form and gravity as she reentered the normal flow of time. Her body became heavy again, a physical object acted on by physical forces, and her five normal senses switched on one by one. She breathed in the scents of her home, and opened her eyes in sudden dismay.

The ruined skyline of lower Manhattan stretched above her in a jagged, gap-toothed grin. At ground level, empty doors and windows gazed out unseeing. Trash and mountainous debris from the last great superhuman war against the Sentinels littered the street. A ragged poster peeling off of one wall proclaimed the fugitive status of mutants who had long since been slaughtered and buried in prison graveyards. Overhead the sky was a steely, stormy gray mass of clouds and watery sunlight. It was nothing that she hadn't seen a thousand times before.

If she walked a few blocks or so, she would find herself right back in the enclosure of the South Bronx Mutant Internment Center.

"This can't be," she said. Her voice echoed off the crumbling walls of the concrete canyon, multiplying her disbelief a half-dozen times. She put a hand to her neck automatically, checking for a collar. She wasn't wearing one, but that changed nothing. _She'd_ changed nothing. A bolt of panic shot through her, and she repeated more loudly, "This can't be!"

But it was.

Dazed and shocked by her failure, Rachel stumbled through the wreckage, seeking safety automatically from Sentinels, and from the roving street gangs that were the only ones who lived in these places now. The habits of half a lifetime were coming back to her even as she railed against the necessity.

Her future should not exist. It should have been erased from reality as the past was changed. She hadn't even been trying to jump back to the year from which she'd left - it was too dangerous, now that everything in the past was different. Now that her mother might have lived a few years longer.

But... but it seemed as though the hand of fate had plucked her from the timestream and dropped her right back where she'd begun. No changes. No chances. No _hope_.

She stopped and leaned against the last remaining wall of a smashed storefront as she tried desperately to figure things out. Her memories were shot, though; she had the feeling that something similar had happened to her before, but she couldn't remember when, or how she'd fixed the problem. She knew who she was, what she'd been doing - trying to change the past so this future wouldn't happen - but the specifics of the last few hours of her life were suddenly mired in a gray fog.

What had gone wrong? Had she not changed things enough? Had she changed too _much_? Had she gone back to the wrong moment in time? - a real possibility, given the big gaps in her memories. Was the true turning point, the key to undoing all this misery, lying somewhere else in those days of future past?

The inconsequence of her effort and all the deaths of her loved ones, the _futility_ of it, made her want to scream in rage and frustration. She was a goddess, she was fire and life incarnate forever, but she could not fix her own time.

"I have to fix this," she said, mumbling it. Her disappointment threatened to crush her soul and her will, but the part of her that was a goddess burned on undimmed. Her feet turned towards the South Bronx 'Center, but what she would do when she got there, what and who she would find, she had no idea.

I have to fix this, she thought, more firmly. She would. No matter what, she would...

-END-


End file.
